Magnetoelastic-Chip Integrated Microfluidic Biosensor for the Detection of African Swine Fever Virus

The African swine fever virus (ASFV), which is highly infectious and lethal, lacks a specific drug for treatment, resulting in the death of infected pigs. Therefore, accurate detection of the ASFV is of utmost importance. Currently, most detection methods for the ASFV primarily focus on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In recent years, novel detection techniques such as double-antigen sandwich side-flow detection and fluorescent immunochromatography bands (FICTS) have emerged successively. However, these methods are intricate to operate and require expensive equipment, posing significant limitations in clinical experiments. Herein, we propose a low-cost, fast and portable magnetoelastic-chip integrated microfluidic biosensor for the detection of the ASFV. The biosensor is mainly composed of the magnetoelastic (ME) chip, an air-core coil, a reaction chamber and a microfluidic channel. It is proposed for the first time to integrate air-core coils into PDMS-based microfluidic biosensor, realizing the integration and flexibility compared to traditional ME sensors. In this experiment, 3D printing technology and microfluidic technology are used to make the prepared biosensor compact, which can realize the integration of sampling and detection, and has the advantages of less reagent consumption, low pollution level, and fast detection speed. We detect the ASFV antigen content by analyzing the resonance frequency of the ME chip that is extremely sensitive to changes in mass. The results show that the biosensor has a linear response with the logarithm of ASFV concentrations in the range of 10 pg/ml-1 mg/ml, and the detection limit (0.83pg/ml) is lower than other detection methods. In addition, the biosensor prepared in this experiment will play a great role in the detection of the ASFV, and has great potential in preventing the outbreak of the African swine fever (ASF) epidemic.