Development of micropump-actuated negative pressure pinched injection for parallel electrophoresis on array microfluidic chip

A micropump-actuated negative pressure pinched injection method is developed for parallel electrophoresis on a multi-channel LIF detection system. The system has a home-made device that could individually control 16-port solenoid valves and a high-voltage power supply. The laser beam is excitated and distributes to the array separation channels for detection. The hybrid Glass-PDMS microfluidic chip comprises two common reservoirs, four separation channels coupled to their respective pneumatic micropumps and two reference channels. Due to use of pressure as a driving force, the proposed method has no sample bias effect for separation. There is only one high-voltage supply needed for separation without relying on the number of channels, which is significant for high-throughput analysis, and the time for sample loading is shortened to 1 s. In addition, the integrated micropumps can provide the versatile interface for coupling with other function units to satisfy the complicated demands. The performance is verified by separation of DNA marker and Hepatitis B virus DNA samples. And this method is also expected to show the potential throughput for the DNA analysis in the field of disease diagnosis.