Femtolitre chemistry assisted by microfluidic pen lithography

Chemical reactions at ultrasmall volumes are becoming increasingly necessary to study biological processes, to synthesize homogenous nanostructures and to perform high-throughput assays and combinatorial screening. Here we show that a femtolitre reaction can be realized on a surface by handling and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2013-07, Vol.4 (1), p.2173, Article 2173
Main Authors: Carbonell, Carlos, Stylianou, Kyriakos C., Hernando, Jordi, Evangelio, Emi, Barnett, Sarah A., Nettikadan, Saju, Imaz, Inhar, Maspoch, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301
639/638/11/877
639/925/930
Crystallization
Enzyme Assays
Humanities and Social Sciences
Microfluidic Analytical Techniques - instrumentation
Microfluidic Analytical Techniques - methods
Microfluidics - instrumentation
Microfluidics - methods
multidisciplinary
Organometallic Compounds - analysis
Organometallic Compounds - chemical synthesis
Peptides - analysis
Peptides - chemistry
Printing - instrumentation
Printing - methods
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:Chemical reactions at ultrasmall volumes are becoming increasingly necessary to study biological processes, to synthesize homogenous nanostructures and to perform high-throughput assays and combinatorial screening. Here we show that a femtolitre reaction can be realized on a surface by handling and mixing femtolitre volumes of reagents using a microfluidic stylus. This method, named microfluidic pen lithography, allows mixing reagents in isolated femtolitre droplets that can be used as reactors to conduct independent reactions and crystallization processes. This strategy overcomes the high-throughput limitations of vesicles and micelles and obviates the usually costly step of fabricating microdevices and wells. We anticipate that this process enables performing distinct reactions (acid-base, enzymatic recognition and metal-organic framework synthesis), creating multiplexed nanoscale metal-organic framework arrays, and screening combinatorial reactions to evaluate the crystallization of novel peptide-based materials. Chemical reactions on femtolitre scales are necessary to study confined biological processes. Here, the authors use a microfluidic pen lithography technique to perform a series of discrete femtoscale acid-base and synthetic reactions, and crystallizations on a surface with high registration accuracy.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/ncomms3173