A three-dimensional origami microfluidic device for paper chromatography: Application to quantification of Tartrazine and Indigo carmine in food samples

Abstract Herein, we report three-dimensional paper chromatography (3D-PC) as a micro-chromatographic platform. The method was based on applying the origami microfluidic device for separation, coupled by colorimetric methods for simultaneous determination. The microfluidic device fabrication was a facile printing approach. Two azo food dyes, Tartrazine (E102) and Indigo carmine (E132), were selected as a model analyte, while carbonate-bicarbonate buffer was used as the mobile phase. Our micro-chromatographic device is associated with two big advantages including needing very small volume of mobile phase ( ~12 µL) and ultrafast separation time (~35 s). Under the optimal conditions, the method provided acceptable linear ranges of 0. 0 g L 1–18.0 g L 1 (R2 = 0.997) for E102 and 0.070 g L 1–10.0 g L 1 for E132 and the limits of detection (3σ/slope) were evaluated as 0.620 and 0.060 g L 1, respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied in the separation and quantification of these dyes in commercial food products such as jelly, candy, and four kinds of drink samples without any sample preparation prior to analysis. The mean recovery values for the real sample analysis were in the range of 100.14%–102.38% for E132 and E102 respectively. The inter-device relative standard deviations were in the ranges of 1.5%–11.8%. In total, our chromatographic μPAD is small (1.0 cm × 1.0 cm × 0.5 cm), portable, inexpensive, no need of specialized user, requires low volumes of sample (0.5 μL), and can perform separation using 12 μL of aqueous mobile phase in very short time.