This article reports the integration of the fiber optic-particle plasmon resonance (FO-PPR) biosensor with a microfluidic chip to reduce response time and improve detection limit. The microfluidic chip made of poly(methyl methacrylate) had a flow-channel of dimensions 4.0 cm × 900 μm × 900 μm. A partially unclad optical fiber with gold or silver nanoparticles on the core surface was placed within the flow-channel, where the volume of the flow space was about 14 μL. Results using sucrose solutions of various refractive indexes show that the refractive index resolution improves by 2.4-fold in the microfluidic system. The microfluidic chip is capable of delivering a precise amount of biological samples to the detection area without sample dilution. Several receptor/analyte pairs were chosen to examine the biosensing capability of the integrated platform: biotin/streptavidin, biotin/anti-biotin, DNP/anti-DNP, OVA/anti-OVA, and anti-MMP-3/MMP-3. Results show that the response time to achieve equilibrium can be shortened from several thousand seconds in a conventional liquid cell to several hundred seconds in a microfluidic flow-cell. In addition, the detection limit also improves by about one order of magnitude. Furthermore, the normalization by using the relative change of transmission response as the sensor output alleviate the demand on precise optical alignment, resulting in reasonably good chip-to-chip measurement reproducibility.
