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 subsequent 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 microliters of organic solvent and enabled detection in a 3 μL volume. In addition, the data obtained from the centrifugal platform showed a good correlation with data obtained from the high performance liquid chromatography analysis.