Microfluidic diatomite analytical devices for illicit drug sensing with ppb-Level sensitivity

[Display omitted] •A microfluidic analytical device based on photonic crystal biosilica micro-channel array.•Ultra-high sensitivity for illicit drug sensing down to 1–10 ppb in human plasma.•Cost-effective platform for point-of-care applications. The escalating research interests in porous media microfluidics, such as microfluidic paper-based analytical devices, have fostered a new spectrum of biomedical devices for point-of-care (POC) diagnosis and biosensing. In this paper, we report microfluidic diatomite analytical devices (μDADs), which consist of highly porous photonic crystal biosilica channels, as an innovative lab-on-a-chip platform to detect illicit drugs. The μDADs in this work are fabricated by spin-coating and tape-stripping diatomaceous earth on regular glass slides with cross section of 400 × 30 μm2. As the most unique feature, our μDADs can simultaneously perform on-chip chromatography to separate small molecules from complex biofluidic samples and acquire the surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectra of the target chemicals with high specificity. Owing to the ultra-small dimension of the diatomite microfluidic channels and the photonic crystal effect from the fossilized diatom frustules, we demonstrate unprecedented sensitivity down to part-per-billion (ppb) level when detecting pyrene (1ppb) from mixed sample with Raman dye and cocaine (10 ppb) from human plasma. This pioneering work proves the exclusive advantage of μDADs as emerging microfluidic devices for chemical and biomedical sensing, especially for POC drug screening.