Automated on-disc total RNA extraction from whole blood towards point-of-care for early-stage diagnostics
Dimov, Nikolay, Gaughran, JenniferORCID: 0000-0002-3659-036X, Clancy, Eoin, Barry, Thomas, Smith, J. Terry and Ducrée, JensORCID: 0000-0002-0366-1897
(2013)
Automated on-disc total RNA extraction from whole blood towards point-of-care for early-stage diagnostics.
In: The 17th Annual IEEE Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems, 16-21 July, Barcelona, Spain.
We present a novel integrated, centrifugo-pneumatic
micro-homogenizer (“μHomogenizer”) for automated
sample preparation and total RNA extraction from whole
blood. Using a Trizol based protocol, this novel
μHomogenizer efficiently lyses whole blood spiked with
E. coli, retains the organic-mixed fraction and yields the
aqueous phase with the total RNA content. By the
interplay of microfluidic design and a protocol of
rotational frequencies, we concatenate (and parallelize) a
sequence of five subsequent liquid handling operations
that complete in less than 10 minutes. A comparison of
the total nucleotide content yields similar performance as
conventional, essentially manual off-disc sample
preparation methods.