Poly(glycidyl methacrylate) as a tunable platform of modifiers for microfluidic devices

In this paper, we report the synthesis of different types of water soluble poly(glycidyl methacrylate) (PGMA) derivatives containing alcohol, sulfonate, piperidyl, and dibencyl pendant groups. Their structures were characterized by infrared (IR), 1H NMR, 13C NMR, thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). It was found that the on-surface modification with PGMA produces a high density of covalently attached island structures, which can be further functionalized. To obtain an insight of the applicability, the synthesized PGMA-derivatives were used as dynamic modifiers of SU-8/Pyrex® microfluidic chips. Their potential was proven by the separation of three model analytes with closely related structures (dopamine, DA, norepinephrine, NE, and epinephrine, E). Under the optimum conditions, baseline separation (Rs values of 1.3 ± 0.1 and 1.58 ± 0.03 for DA-NE and NE-E respectively) was achieved within 3 min. The fact that the PGMA-based polymers reported in this work are water soluble opens the possibility of their application in microchannel surface modification, but also in many other research fields such as materials science and biochemistry.