iBB

Eduardo Brás defended his PhD thesis in Biotechnology and Biosciences on Tuesday the 15th september 2020 (14:30 H). During the last years, and under the supervision João Pedro Conde from INESC-MN and Pedro Fernandes from BERG-iBB, Eduardo explored how microfluidic technology and microfabrication could be coupled with enzymes with goal of developing biosensing in different fields of application. The title of the thesis is “Biocatalysis in Microfluidic Systems: Biosensing and Rapid Screening Applications”.

Microfluidic biosensing devices are becoming a key part in the development of point-of-care diagnosis systems for medical, animal and agricultural applications alike. However, to fully take advantage of the features presented by microfluidics technology, one has to be capable of providing the appropriate instrumentation for the actuation of the devices and transduction of the results produced by said devices. A versatile and portable platform for the optical transduction of microfluidic devices was recently the target of a publication in the IEEE Sensors Journal  In this work, thin-film, hydrogenated amorphous silicon photosensors are used to transduce the optical assay for the detection of azelaic acid in wine producing grapes infected with the fungus B. cinerea. The portable prototype provides all necessary electronics for liquid manipulation, light sources and electronic amplification for the assay read-out. The work was performed by Biotechnology PhD student Eduardo Brás (INESC-MN/IBB) and Biotechnology Alumni Dr. Rui Pinto under the supervision ofJoão Pedro Conde (INESC-MN/DBE) and Pedro Fernandes (BERG-iBB).

Biotechnology PhD student, Eduardo Brás, gave a poster presentation at the 23rd edition of the MicroTAS conference in Basel, Switzerland. The poster was about the multiplexed detection of plant health biomarkers in grapes, using a microfluidic platform. The system developed consists of a microfluidic chip containing sample preparation and detection modules for both Azelaic Acid and Salicylic Acid, coupled with a-Si:H for real time optical transduction. The work was carried out under the supervision of Prof. João Pedro Conde (INESC-MN) and Prof. Pedro Fernandes (iBB-BERG), with the collaboration of Prof. Ana Margarida Fortes (FCUL). Eduardo was also co-author of another poster presentation concerning the development of a microfluidic chip for targeted phage selection for personalized colorectal cancer treatment and received a travel grant to the conference.