Pressure-driven laminar flow switching for rapid exchange of solution environment around surface adhered biological particles.

This paper describes a technique for rapidly exchanging the solution environment near a surface by displacing laminar flow fluid streams using sudden changes in applied pressure. The method employs off-chip solenoid valves to induce pressure changes, which is important in keeping the microfluidic design simple and the operation of the system robust. The performance of this technique is characterized using simulation and validated with experiments.

High-throughput capillary-electrophoresis analysis of the contents of a single mitochondria.

We present a technique for labeling the contents of acidic organelles and rapidly releasing, separating, and detecting their labeled contents with laser-induced fluorescence. We have performed solution-phase separation of the contents of single mitochondria and single 100 nm vesicles, which represents a demonstration of an analyzed volume of approximately 1 aL. Our strategy to label the acidic contents of the mitochondrion relies on the use of the membrane-permeable dye, Oregon Green diacetate succinimidyl ester, and a membrane-permeable base to raise intramitochondrial pH.

Fourier transform capillary electrophoresis with laminar-flow gated pressure injection.

Fourier transform capillary electrophoresis (FTCE) was developed as a method to improve signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and resolution in capillary electrophoresis (CE) separation. In FTCE, multiple simultaneous CE separations were performed in the same channel system and interrogated using a single-point detector. To illustrate experimentally the improvement offered by FTCE in S/N ratio and resolution, we carried out a modest number (five) of multiple injections and separations.