A fully battery-powered inexpensive spectrophotometric system for high-sensitivity point-of-care analysis on a microfluidic chip.

A cost-effective b[combining low line]a[combining low line]ttery-powered s[combining low line]pectrophotometric s[combining low line]ystem (BASS) was developed for quantitative point-of-care (POC) analysis on a microfluidic chip. By using methylene blue as a model analyte, we first compared the performance of the BASS with a commercial spectrophotometric system, and further applied the BASS for loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) detection and subsequent quantitative nucleic acid analysis which exhibited a comparable limit of detection to that of Nanodrop. Compared to the commercial spectrophotometric system, our spectrophotometric system is lower-cost, consumes less reagents, and has higher detection sensitivity. Most importantly, it does not rely on external power supplies. All these features make our spectrophotometric system highly suitable for a variety of POC analyses, such as field detection.