Development of Detachable PDMS/Glass PCR-Chip and It’s Application to Detection of Male Infertility

Abstract

Our precedent study has reported glass-PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) based biochip for the gene PCR (polymerase chain reaction). To prevent the contamination of bio sample, the once used biochip must not be used repeatedly. However, the fabrication cost of microheater and microsensor of the biochip was not cheap to use it as a disposable chip. This paper proposes new PCR-chip where the glass substrate integrated with the microheater and microsensor is detachable from the reaction chamber where the sample is injected. That makes it possible to reuse the glass substrate repeatedly. The performance of the proposed detachable PCRchip was compared with that of the precedent monolithic PCR-chip. The results showed that the SRY (sex determining Y chromosome) gene PCR was successfully performed in the detachable chip compared with the monolithic chip. However, the more efforts to improve the efficiency of surface treatment of PDMS chip are needed to increase the possibility of applying the detachable chip to the detecting of male infertility.