Biochemical Reaction Acceleration by Electrokinetic Mixing in a Microfluidic Chip.

In the past two decades, a large number of micromixers have been studied and reported to solve the low mass transfer in microchannels. However, there is still a lack of research on how much biochemical reaction efficiency or detection sensitivity can be improved by microfluidic rapid mixing. In this study, using our previously developed ultrafast microelectrokinetic turbulent (μEKT) mixing method, taking glucose oxidation reaction as the research object, we investigated the effect of increasing microfluidic mass transfer efficiency on the efficiency and sensitivity of biochemical reactions. The results showed that fast mixing could improve the enzymatic reaction efficiency by improving the mass transfer efficiency. Further detection of glucose in glucose solutions and blood samples showed that the fast mixing could significantly improve the sensitivity of detection. These results indicate that mixing enhancement can be a significant step of microfluidics-based applications such as POCT, liquid biopsy, food safety, and so on.