Use of Gel Pads or Particles with Oil Isolation to Create Small Reaction Volumes

Technology

Professor Pat Doyle and colleagues have developed a method involving isolated, aqueous containers formed from miniaturized hydrogels, which addresses many of the limitations of conventional microfluidics approaches. These hydrogels can take on two forms: gel cylinders attached to glass slides or microchannels; and individual gel particles.  These gels have many advantages, including straightforward fabrication, tunable chemistry and mesh size, hydrophilicity and insolubility in water.  Using these hydrogels allows for ultrasensitive biomolecule detection and enables new characterization of biological systems.  These unique hydrogels also possess the ability to concentrate reaction products, capture cell secreted analytes without allowing contaminants to penetrate their pores, and easily multiplex several analytes, avoiding the complex workflows with complicated microfluidic chip design and fabrication.

Problem Addressed   

Conventional biological assays are often characterized by long incubation times, high reagent costs, and labor-intensive protocols.  Miniaturizing these assays using microfluidics solves many of these issues; smaller sample volumes increase reaction rates and decrease quantities of necessary reagents, and microfluidic arrays are often amenable to automation to increase throughput.  However, complex fabrication of many microfluidic systems reduces their usefulness in many situations.   

Advantages      

• Tunable properties
• Supports multiplexed reagents
• Reaction volume on femtoliter to picoliter scale
• High resolution readout