ABSTRACT
A viral outbreak may cause heavy repercussions to human life as
well as the economy and the environment. For this reason health
services rely on fast diagnosis and disease surveillance to minimize
consequences of such outbreaks.1 Whether the epidemic is due to
natural causes or a bioterrorism act, a main issue in controlling
viral outbreaks is the ability to detect and identify the virus as
early as possible. Only after the type and location of the virus
is known, proper measures can be taken in order to contain the
outbreak.2 However, detection methods are currently expensive
and time consuming and require complex laboratory equipment,
for example, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and enzyme-linked
immunosorbent assay (ELISA). There is therefore a pressing need
for deployable, on-site detection devices able to simultaneously
screen a number of candidates and quickly identify and quantify the
threat. Various degrees of deployment are conceivable, such as han-
dled, point-of-care devices, monitoring devices for high-exposure
institutions such as hospitals, or on a battlefield.3 One of the most
appealing approaches to high-throughput parallel screening is the
arrayed biosensor, or biochip. The current microarray technology, however, produces large biochips which require heavy and expen-
sive separate readout systems (scanners) and thus are used predom-
inantly in large facilities such as research institutes and hospitals.
Miniaturization of currentmicroarrays by orders ofmagnitude is the
first step in achieving portable, deployable, arrayed biosensors.
