PMMA Microfluidics Devices Fabrications and its Application in Electrophoresis

Abstract

It is believed that Lab-on-chip microfluidics technology is the key to powerful new diagnostic instruments. These microfluidics devices are conventionally made from glass and silicon. However, polymers such as Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) have several advantages such as much lower fabrication costs and complexity.  In addition to the lower cost of the raw material these plastic substrates can be patterned using a wide variety of methods, including laser ablation, hot embossing, reactive ion etching and deep UV lithography. Therefore, there is a great demand to develop plastic diagnostics devices that would allow early diagnosis of disease by using easy to collect body fluids. This project deals with characterising the electrophoretic protein separation on laser machined PMMA (Plexiglas) microfluidic channels. This microfluidic unit will serve as a foundation for the protein analysis. Detection of proteins in microfluidic systems will be done by using electrophoretic separation process with fluorescent detection. To achieve this separation, a strong electric field has to be applied using a high voltage power supply. We plan to use the commercially available disposable camera flash units as the supply of this high voltage instead of voltage amplifier systems. In this presentation, we would like to talk about the pinch injection of fluorescent electrolytes into a PMMA microfluidic unit and how it will be used for protein separation.