Disposable microfluidic device with ultraviolet detection for highly resolved screening of illicit drugs

Abstract

A disposable microfluidic device was constructed by conveniently integrating one poly(methyl methacrylate) board with four reservoirs and one fractured fused-silica capillary with 50 µm i.d. and 7.5 cm total length on a printed circuit board for applying sampling and separation voltages. The disposable microfluidic device combined with a home-made ultraviolet workstation could be conveniently used for efficient screening and quantitative detection of µg mL⁻¹ illicit drugs. Using eight illicit drugs as models, they could be baseline-separated within 240 s with the separation efficiency up to 600 047 plates m⁻¹ at the designed device. The novel device and proposed protocol were successfully used to screen illicit drugs in human urine. This work presented a simple and low-cost method to fabricate the microfluidic device and provided a powerful way for sensitive and specific multi-screening of different drugs with high resolution, fast separation and low-cost.