Membrane based sample preparation chip

Abstract

Microfluidics plays an important role for the miniaturization of chemical and bio-chemical processes used for the detec-tion of pathological states. Aside from the detection process itself sample preparation is a crucial but often neglected step in the process chain. While traditional methods use many manual handling steps in tubes or wells we present the integra-tion of nucleic acid extraction in a small polymer chip by using proven extraction in a silica membrane. The results are compared to a conventional in tube protocol with the same volume of lysed sample. © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston.