A microfluidic fluorous solid-phase extraction chip for purification of amino acids

An electrokinetically-driven microfluidic chip was developed to realize beads-based solid-phase extraction (SPE) of amino acids. This chip uses a two-level (deep/shallow) poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microchannel network to confine the fluorous reversed-phase silica beads within the SPE chamber. The mixture of fluorous tagged and non-tagged amino acids was carried into the fluorous solid-phase extraction (F-SPE) chamber by electrokinetic pumping and was successfully separated and extracted. By adding a reference material to the sample, the extraction efficiency of the eluted fluorous-tagged amino acid was calculated using the detection results from mass spectrometry (MS). The F-SPE microchips showed good reproducibility and efficiency, yielding an average extraction efficiency of 55% with a RSD of 10.6% under the typical experimental conditions.

Graphical abstractA simple but effective fabrication procedure was developed to build a retaining chamber for silica beads in the poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microchannel. The resulting structure was a combination of two layers of PDMS slabs that contained two sets of channels with different depths.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide