Extraction, enrichment, and in situ electrochemical detection on lab- on-a-disc; monitoring the production of a bacterial secondary metabolite

Development of microsystems, which enable 'sample-to-answer' detection from real samples, is often challenging. We present the first integration of supported liquid membrane extraction combined with electrochemical detection on a centrifugal fluidic platform. The developed lab-on-a-disc (LoD) system enabled the separation, enrichment and subse-quent electrochemical detection of the target analyte from a complex sample mixture.

As a case study, we quantified the amount of a dietary supplement and pharmaceutical precursor, p-Coumaric acid, from bacterial growth media at different time points during production. The assay, extraction, and detection, performed on the LoD device, proved to be a low cost and environmentally friendly approach, requiring only a few tens of µL organic solvent and enabled detection in 3 µL volume.

In addition, the data obtained from the centrifugal platform showed a good correlation with data obtained from high performance liquid chromatography analysis.