Multispectral Chiral Quasi-Bound States in the Continuum Enabled Microfluidics for High-Throughput Molecular...

Area of Science:

• Spectroscopy
• Microfluidics
• Metamaterials

Background:

• Traditional chiral detection methods are limited by label dependence and low throughput, hindering trace enantiomer analysis.
• Accurate characterization of chiral molecules is crucial for clinical diagnostics and drug development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a label-free, high-throughput platform for chiral molecule screening and quantitation.
• To integrate terahertz (THz) multispectral technology with microfluidics and metamaterials for enhanced chiral sensing.

Main Methods:

• A metachip with chiral quasi-bound states in the continuum (q-BIC) pixels was engineered to generate high circular dichroism (CD) in the 0.5-2.0 THz range.
• On-chip microfluidics enabled multi-dimensional CD feature extraction in aqueous solutions.
• The Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) algorithm was used to map CD features into a 2D spectrum for analysis.

Main Results:

• The platform achieved label-free, high-throughput screening and quantitation of chiral molecules.
• It demonstrated simultaneous conformation identification and concentration quantification (0.05-0.3 mg dL⁻¹).
• An 87.5% discrimination accuracy was achieved for 8 chiral biomolecules in aqueous solutions with high sensitivity.

Conclusions:

• The developed THz multispectral metachip-enabled microfluidic platform offers a transformative tool for trace enantiomer characterization.
• This technology bridges the gap between high-sensitivity chiral sensing and real-time fluidic analysis.
• It has significant potential applications in clinical diagnostics and drug development.