LAB-ON-PAPER ELECTROANALYTICAL DEVICES: TOWARDS THE FULLY INTEGRATION OF STEPS

E. COSTA-RAMA; E. NUÑEZ-BAJO; A. GONZALEZ-LOPEZ; O. AMOR-GUTIÉRREZ; L. BLANCO-COVIÁN; C. BLANCO-LOPEZ; H.P.A. NOUWS; C. DELERUE-MATOS; NANNI, P.I.; R.E. MADRID; FERNANDEZ ABEDUL, MARIA TERESA

Simposio; 25th Latin-American Symposium on Biotechnology, Biomedical, Biopharmaceutical, and Industrial Applications of Capillary Electrophoresis and Microchip Technology; 2019

There is a marked trend towards decentralization of analysis. It is an urgent requirement in environmental, food, clinical and other fields of analysis. This is the moment to include a new milestone in the timeline of Analytical Chemistry. Our discipline is becoming bifid: complicated and expensive high-tech equipment is living together with low-cost and simple devices for doing the same thing, that is performing analytical processes. On the one hand, current difficult problems require exquisite sophistication in the instruments and methodologies but, at the same time, the use of drones in environmental monitoring, the urge for fruit analyses after post-harvest treatments or the occurrence of episodes such as stroke are some of the examples that will require point-of-use devices. Paper can undoubtedly play a main role in this scenario. Properties and benefits are well known. Remarkable are the possibility of fluid flowing by capillary forces, the ability to store functional materials or the integration with several detection schemes. Among them, the electrochemical detection fits perfectly with decentralization purposes. All the advantages make this material perfect for the integration of several steps of the analytical process to generate simple but sample-to-result lab-on-paper analytical devices.