Portable microfluidic devices for monitoring antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater

Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) pose serious threats to environmental and public health, and monitoring ARGs in wastewater is a growing need because wastewater is an important source. Microfluidic devices can integrate basic functional units involved in sample assays on a small chip, through the precise control and manipulation of micro/nanofluids in micro/nanoscale spaces, demonstrating the great potential of ARGs detection in wastewater. Here, we (1) summarize the state of the art in microfluidics for recognizing ARGs, (2) determine the strengths and weaknesses of portable microfluidic chips, and (3) assess the potential of portable microfluidic chips to detect ARGs in wastewater. Isothermal nucleic acid amplification and CRISPR/Cas are two commonly used identification elements for the microfluidic detection of ARGs. The former has better sensitivity due to amplification, but false positives due to inappropriate primer design and contamination; the latter has better specificity. The combination of the two can achieve complementarity to a certain extent. Compared with traditional microfluidic chips, low-cost and biocompatible paper-based microfluidics is a very attractive test for ARGs, whose fluid flow in paper does not require external force, but it is weaker in terms of repeatability and high-throughput detection. Due to that only a handful of portable microfluidics detect ARGs in wastewater, fabricating high-throughput microfluidic chips, developing and optimizing recognition techniques for the highly selective and sensitive identification and quantification of a wide range of ARGs in complex wastewater matrices are needed.

Graphical Abstract