Past, current, and future roles of 3D printing in the development of capillary electrophoresis systems.

3D printing, an additive manufacturing technology, has made significant inroads into improving systems for bioanalysis in recent years. This approach is particularly powerful due to the ease and flexibility in rapidly creating novel and complex designs for analytical applications. As such, 3D printing offers an emerging technology for creating systems for electrophoretic analysis.

Improving droplet microfluidic systems for studying single bacteria growth.

Antimicrobial resistance remains a global threat with ~ 5 million deaths in 2019 alone and 10 million deaths projected every year by 2050. Current tools employed in the analysis of bacteria can be time inefficient, leading to delayed diagnosis and treatment. In this work, we develop a microfluidic setup capable of bacteria incubation and detection of growth in ~ 2 h.

Multilabel hybridization probes for sequence-specific detection of sepsis-related drug resistance genes in plasmids.

Emerging antimicrobial drug resistance is increasing the complexity involved in treating critical conditions such as bacterial induced sepsis. Methods for diagnosing specific drug resistance tend to be rapid or sensitive, but not both. Detection methods like sequence-specific single-molecule analysis could address this concern if they could be adapted to work on smaller targets similar to those produced in traditional clinical situations.

Rapid and simple pressure-sensitive adhesive microdevice fabrication for sequence-specific capture and fluorescence detection of sepsis-related bacterial plasmid gene sequences.

Microbial resistance to currently available antibiotics poses a great threat in the global fight against infections. An important step in determining bacterial antibiotic resistance can be selective DNA sequence capture and fluorescence labeling. In this paper, we demonstrate the fabrication of simple, robust, inexpensive microfluidic devices for DNA capture and fluorescence detection of a model antibiotic resistance gene sequence.