Terahertz Lab-on-a-Chip for Bio-liquid Analysis

全球对新技术的需求日益增加，这些技术可以提供快速准确的医疗诊断，并改善患者的治疗效果。生物传感器领域已经急剧增长，以满足这一需求，在微流体和微电子学的显着改进的帮助下。微技术的这场革命导致了芯片实验室（Lab-on-a-chip，简称LAB）形式的生物传感器的实现，该芯片可以在单个芯片上对微量液体样品进行一次或多次实验室分析。这种分析可以采取许多不同的形式，如化学，声学，低频电或光学。太赫兹频率范围（100 GHz至3 THz）是生物系统电磁分析的新兴领域。对于生物液体，它能够探测生物分子-溶剂系统中存在的旋转和振动模式，并且对生物分子的水合、温度、结合和构象状态高度敏感。尽管对于感测具有这些显著的优点，但是太赫兹波遭受相对长的波长，这将可以被感测到的最小可检测物体或液体体积限制为与波长立方相当的尺寸。这种尺寸限制，称为衍射极限，是显着大于许多感兴趣的对象，如生物cell.In这项工作中，我们建议将多个太赫兹谐振器与微流体系统，以创建一个能够快速检测自由流动的生物液体的传感器。谐振器被设计成将测量电场集中到与细胞大小相当的体积，克服衍射极限，并允许对皮升量的生物液体和单个细胞进行电磁分析。该仪器将作为细胞科学研究的测量平台，用于极少量的各种细胞成分（例如蛋白质、DNA和RNA）和其他感兴趣的生物分子。该研究计划旨在推动太赫兹液体传感在灵敏度（10倍）方面的最新技术水平，最小的样品体积和低成本的制造，在即时诊断和临床应用中开辟了新的传感和诊断机会。虽然主要针对生物液体的分析，但开发的芯片实验室设备也将被证明适用于有毒和爆炸性液体的分析以及气体传感。

There is an increasing global demand for new technologies which deliver rapid and accurate medical diagnostics and lead to improved patient outcomes. The biological sensors field has grown dramatically to meet this demand, aided by significant improvements in microfluidics and microelectronics. This revolution in micro-technology has led to the realisation of biological sensors in the form of a lab-on-a-chip (LOC) that can perform one or more lab analyses of minute quantities of liquid samples on a single chip. This analysis can take many different forms such as chemical, acoustic, low-frequency electrical or optical.The terahertz frequency range (100 GHz to 3 THz) is an emerging area for the electromagnetic analysis of biological systems. For biological liquids, it is capable of probing rotational and vibrational modes present in biomolecule-solvent systems and is also highly sensitive to biomolecular hydration, temperature, binding and conformational states. Despite these significant advantages for sensing, terahertz waves suffer from a relatively long wavelength which limits the smallest detectable object or liquid volume that can be sensed to a size comparable to a wavelength cubed. This size limit, called the diffraction limit, is significantly larger than many objects of interest such as a biological cell.In this work, we propose to integrate multiple terahertz resonators with a microfluidic system to create a LOC capable of rapidly sensing free-flowing bio-liquids. The resonators are designed to concentrate the measuring electric field down to a volume comparable to a cell size, overcoming the diffraction limit, and permitting the electromagnetic analysis of picolitre quantities of biological liquids and individual cells. This LOC will function as a measurement platform for scientific studies of cells, extremely small quantities of various cell components (e.g. proteins, DNA and RNA) and other biomolecules of interest.The research programme intends to push the current state-of-the-art in terahertz liquid sensing in terms of sensitivity (10x), minimum sample volume and low-cost fabrication to open up new sensing and diagnostic opportunities in point-of-care diagnosis and clinical applications. While primarily directed towards the analysis of bio-liquids, the lab-on-a-chip devices developed will also prove useful for the analysis of toxic and explosive liquids, as well as gas sensing.