Rapid Protein Separations in Microfluidic Devices

This paper describes fabrication of glass and plastic microfluidic devices for protein separations. Although the long-term goal is to develop a microfluidic device for two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, this paper focuses on the first dimension-isoelectric focusing (IEF). A laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) imaging system has been built for imaging an entire channel in an IEF device. The whole-channel imaging eliminates the need to migrate focused protein bands, which is required if a single-point detector is used. Using the devices and the imaging system, we are able to perform IEF separations of proteins within minutes rather than hours in traditional bench-top instruments.