A portable microfluidic platform for rapid determination of microbial load and somatic cell count in milk

Abstract

Microfluidics systems that have been emerged in the last 20 years and used for processing the fluid in a microchannel structure at microliter levels are alternative to the conventional methods. The objective of the study is to develop a microfluidic platform for determination of the microbial load and the number of somatic cells in milk. For this purpose, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chip with a channel size of 300 μm × 60 μm was produced. Cells/bacteria labeled with fluorescent stain in milk were counted with the proposed microfluidic platform and the results were compared with the reference cell concentration/the bacterial counts by conventional method. It was found that our platform could count somatic and bacterial cells with an accuracy above 80% in 20 min run for each analysis. The portable overall platform has an overall dimension of 25x25x25 cm and weighs approximately 9 kg.