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Polymer&Protein-Polymer Crosslinking
Polymer&Protein-Polymer Crosslinking
Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a type of synthetic plymer with wide applications in the field of biology and medicine due to its great biocompatibility, ideal mechanical and degradability properties. Examples of PEG applications include drug delivery, tissue engineering and gene therapy. Our design uses PEG to form a bead with biomarker protein inside, which allows high screening sensitivity to one single molecule level.
Polymers such as PEG usually crosslink with biomolecules to serve biological and medical purposes. Our project utilizes Michael Addition to form bonds between PEG and biomarker proteins. Traut’s reagents are used to convert the amine group on the protein to a thiol group. The thiolated proteins are mixed with the backbone 8 arm PEG-VS and the crosslinker PEG-dithiol, which allows the conjugation of protein with backbone PEG-VS as well as the polymerization of PEG monomer.
Microfluidic droplet generator
Microfluidic droplet generator
Microfluidics is a field that deals with the manipulation, behavior and precise control of fluids. With the use of microfluidics, especially on the submillimeter scale, many new technologies have been created. In particular, nanoparticles have shown increase in use for multiple technologies. Droplet microfluidics serves as a good high throughput method for chemical bioassays because it offers a large measure of control over reactions while also offering rapid mixing with decreased reaction times. Two microfluidic geometries frequently used for droplet formation are T-junction (Figure A) and flow-focusing techniques (Figure B). T-junction geometry utilizes two channels perpendicular to one another, one containing the disperse phase (aqueous) and the main channel containing the oil. The size of the droplet depends on the flow rates, channel geometry, capillary number and viscosity ratio. The flow focusing technique involves a central channel and two perpendicular channels that are symmetric to one another containing a second immiscible liquid. These channels containing the two liquid phases flow through a small opening and thus create small droplets. This technology of utilizing a microfluidics device to create droplets will therefore be used to stabilize and encapsulate proteins for detection in our project.
design inspiration: droplet digital pcr
design inspiration: droplet digital pcr
Digital Droplet PCR is a convenient method to quantify nucleic acids. It improves upon the current PCR by partitioning the reaction into multiple smaller reactions in single droplets through the water oil emulsion technique. The positive reaction, the droplet with nuleic template and proper amplification, will fluoresce, which accurately indicates the amount of molecules in the sample. Our design uses this concept on protein molecules: biomarker protein molecules are partitioned into single droplets using microfluidic generator and the droplet contains protein molecule will give positive signal which helps quantify biomarker protein molecules in the cancer patients' blood sample.
Page leader: Yifu Jin
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