Fragmentation of DNA in a sub-microliter microfluidic sonication device

Fragmentation of DNA is an essential step for many biological applications including the preparation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) libraries. As sequencing technologies push the limits towards single cell and single molecule resolution, it is of great interest to reduce the scale of this upstream fragmentation step. Here we describe a miniaturized DNA shearing device capable of processing sub-microliter samples based on acoustic shearing within a microfluidic chip. A strong acoustic field was generated by a Langevin-type piezo transducer and coupled into the microfluidic channel via the flexural lamb wave mode. Purified genomic DNA, as well as covalently cross-linked chromatin were sheared into various fragment sizes ranging from similar to 180 bp to 4 kb. With the use of standard PDMS soft lithography, our approach should facilitate the integration of additional microfluidic modules and ultimately allow miniaturized NGS workflows.