Harnessing Joule heating in microfluidic thermal gel electrophoresis to create reversible barriers for cell enrichment.

ABSTRACT: Gel electrophoresis is a ubiquitous bioanalytical technique used to characterize the components of cell lysates. However, analyses of bulk lysates sacrifice detection sensitivity because intracellular biomolecules become diluted, and the liberation of proteases and nucleases can degrade target analytes. This report describes a method to enrich cells directly within a microfluidic gel as a first step toward online measurement of trace intracellular biomolecules with minimal dilution and degradation. Thermal gels were employed as the gel matrix because they can be reversibly converted between liquid and solid phases as a function of temperature. Rather than fabricate costly heating elements into devices to control temperature-and thus the phase of the gel-Joule heating was used instead. Adjo

SUBMITTER: Cornejo MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8178196 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature