There is great interest today in miniaturized analytical systems for life science research, the clinical environment, drug discovery, biotechnology, quality control, and environmental monitoring. The dream is that through micro- and nanofabrication it will be possible to prefabricate all the fluidic components of either single or multiple integrated, self-contained laboratories of a size equivalent to a computer chip. It is thought that these systems will be capable of executing analyses in which chemical reactions, separations, and various forms of detection are integrated into a single method. The broad goal of this work is to create a variety of prefabricated, miniaturized laboratories on quartz wafers capable of either large scale parallel processing analyses in a conventional laboratory environment, multi-component analyses in a non-laboratory environment, such as a doctor's office, or long-term unattended remote sensing.
Specific aims of the project are to i) examine the general design, optimization, fabrication, and operational issues relating to surface modification of microchannels, control of electroosmotic flow, aliquoting and mixing samples and reagents, construction of absorbance flow cells on chips, applications of chemiluminescence detectors, fabrication of low restrictors and filters, and sensitivity of EMMA sensors, ii) determine the viability of bringing a small number of reagents and receptors to large numbers of individual drug candidate stored on library chips, iii) create chip based analytical systems capable of determining multiple compounds in a single blood or cellular sample by immunological assays, enzyme assays, and electrophoresis, and iv) fabricate chip based EMMA sensors that consume less than a uL of reagent a day for remot sensing applications.
| Patterson, D H; Harmon, B J; Regnier, F E (1996) Dynamic modeling of electrophoretically mediated microanalysis. J Chromatogr A 732:119-32 |
