Migration of bacteria through a monolith

The separation of bacteria by electromigration techniques was a subject of several of our previous papers. This contribution presents the results of investigation of the porosity of the monolithic bed and migration of Staphylococcus aureus cells through it. The gigaporous monolith was thermally synthesized using glycidyl methacrylate, triethylene glycol dimethacrylate and trimethylolpropane trimethacrylate as the monomers in the presence of porogen solvent containing 1-decanol, polyethylene glycol and 2-methoxyethanol. The porous properties were evaluated by inverse size-exclusion chromatography (ISEC) using a wide range of polystyrene standards of different molecular weights. The results have shown, that large pores (ca. 300 nm) dominate in the monolithic bed structure, however much larger flow-through pores must also be present as ca. 1 μm sized S. aureus bacteria were able to migrate through the bed.