earticle

영어

Nucleic acid extraction/purification is an essential step for many biomolecular diagnostics. In particular, the on-site virus detection system requires to obtain the DNA/RNA from biological samples with ease and high rapidity [1]. However, the conventional nucleic acid extraction method such as phenol extraction [2] or ethanol precipitation is highly labor intensive and time consuming due to numerous manual steps, and it is not adequate for the on-site sample preparation. To address this issue, we have developed a rotary microfluidic system to extract and purify the RNA without necessity of mechanical external syringe pumps to allow flow control. We designed three reservoirs for sample, washing buffer, and elution buffer which were connected with different dimensional microfluidic channels. By controlling RPM, we could dispense a RNA sample solution, a washing buffer, and an elution buffer successively, so that the RNA was captured in the sol-gel solid phase, purified, and eluted in the downstream. Such a novel rotary sample preparation system eliminates any complicated hardware and human intervention, and performs the RNA preparation with high speed and portability.