Development of an Optically Induced Dielectrophoresis (ODEP) Microfluidic System for High-Performance Isolation and Purification of Bacteria

For the rapid detection of bacteria in a blood sample, nucleic acid amplification-based assays are believed to be promising. Nevertheless, the nucleic acids released from the dead blood cells or bacteria could affect the assay performance. This highlights the importance of the isolation of live bacteria from blood samples. To address this issue, this study proposes a two-step process. First, a blood sample was treated with the immuno-magnetic microbeads-based separation to remove the majority of blood cells. Second, an optically induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP) microfluidic system with an integrated dynamic circular light image array was utilized to further isolate and purify the live bacteria from the remaining blood cells based on their size difference. In this work, the ODEP microfluidic system was developed. Its performance for the isolation and purification of bacteria was evaluated. The results revealed that the method was able to harvest the live bacteria in a high purity (90.5~99.2%) manner. Overall, the proposed method was proven to be capable of isolating and purifying high-purity live bacteria without causing damage to the co-existing cells. This technical feature was found to be valuable for the subsequent nucleic-acid-based bacteria detection, in which the interferences caused by the nontarget nucleic acids could be eliminated.