Microfluidic device for integrated restriction digestion reaction and resulting DNA fragment analysis

A microfluidic system combining temperature-controlled reactor, analyte delivery, chip electrophoresis (CE) separation, and fluorescence detection was developed, in which the heaters, resistance temperature detectors, enzymatic reactors, CE channels, and pneumatic valves/pumps were integrated onto a single glass-PDMS chip. The microdevice was used to perform the digestion reaction, followed by on-line electrophoresis separation and detection of the resulting fragments with endonuclease BamHI and FokI as models. Pneumatic valves/pumps served not only for isolating the reaction region from the separation medium to prevent contamination, but also for delivering and quantitatively diluting the fluid from the reaction chamber to the CE section. Thus enzymatic reaction and electrophoresis separation could be insulated and connected as needed. A dynamic coating procedure with the use of PVP and mannitol was firstly adopted for glass-PDMS hybrid chip-based DNA separations, leading to an improved separation efficiency with reproducible migration time and theoretical plates. The expected 263- and 287-bp digestion products of BamHI and FokI were definitely verified by the size-based electrophoretic separation and detection. The whole integrated reaction-CE system can be manipulated in a simple manner with good reproducibility, which is expected to be applied in other on-line analysis of various biochemical reactions.