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Microfluidic technology has developed rapidly in recent decades and has been widely used in the field of protein analysis. Creative Biolabs, organized a staff of excellent scientists with extensive expertise in microfluidic technology and protein analysis. We are devoted to offering a full range of microfluidic chip development services to support a variety of protein functional research.

Introduction of Microfluidic Chip in Functional Protein Detection

Microfluidic chip, also known as lab-on-a-chip, is coupled with various kinds of detection techniques (such as optical detection method, electrochemical detection method and mass spectrometry detection method, etc.) to be widely in protein and proteomics analysis. It is a multi-functional integrated system containing several basic operating units such as sample preparation, biological and chemical reactions, separation and detection, allowing rapid and accurate detection for a variety of proteins in multiple samples at a single assay. The microfluidic chip-based biosensor has been recognized as a powerful technology for protein detection and is widely applied in basic and clinical diagnosis researches.

Advantages of microfluidic chip

• High analytical throughput
• High sensitivity
• Excellent analytical performance
• Multi-dimensional parallelization analysis
• Low reagent, short reaction time, and power consumption

Cancer Protein Marker Detection

It is very important for cancer progression and classification to detect and analyze cancer protein marker expression and function. However, there have several analytical challenges in detecting proteins expressed in a given sample, including dynamic range of proteins at the cellular level, significant molecular diversity, extreme complexity of post-translational modifications, and a tendency to adsorb to solid surfaces. Interestingly, emerging of microfluidic chip technology provides a large prospect for cancer protein detection, with high throughput, high sensitivity, and low cost. A polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) microchip CAE system, fabricated with integrated on-chip fluorescence derivatization function, consists of 8 parallel lanes, which allows to label and separate up to 8 different samples simultaneously. The system enables the separation of a cancer-related protein from the mixtures of model biomarkers in parallel. A microfluidic-based immunohistochemistry (IHC) system was produced by integrating specimens slide with different reaction microchannels on a chip, which enables to simultaneously detect several cancer-related proteins. Importantly, the integration of microfluidics and multi-techniques of MS analysis had a better performance for the high-throughput screening and detection of cancer protein marker. Especially, chip-CE integrating with nano-ESI MS allows higher sensitivity of the trace-level protein biomarker detection.

Fig. 1 The advantages of microfluidic chip for cancer biomarker detection.¹

Single-cell Resolution Protein Analysis

Single-cell analysis has attracted great interest because of its remarkable ability to study intercellular heterogeneity in large populations. However, protein detection at a single cell resolution has great challenges due to the small cell size, the complexity and large concentration range of proteins, and the lack of genome-wide amplification methods. Microfluidics technology coupled to various analytical techniques has emerged as a powerful platform for single-cell protein analysis due to their high throughput, high reproducibility, large parallelization, ease of operation, and low cost. An integrated microfluidic device coupled with MS has been applied for analysis of hemoglobin in individual human erythrocytes with a throughput of 12 cells per minute. A novel nanoPOTS (nanodroplet processing in one pot for trace samples) platform combines microfluidic nanodroplet sample processing, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), with an ultrasensitive NanoLC-MS system, enabling to analyze proteome of a single mammalian cell, even circulating tumor cells.

Fig. 2 Magnetic beads-based digital microfluidic immunology analysis.²

Services at Creative Biolabs

Creative Biolabs is a world-leading services provider in the field of microfluidic chip development. We are dedicated to supporting functional protein detection services by designing and developing a high-quality and high-sensitivity microfluidic chip system. Experienced in microfluidic chip development, our in-home scientists are able to custom different types of microfluidic chips to meet different purposes of projects, greatly improving the accuracy and sensitivity of the detection. If you are interested in our services, please contact us to discuss your project.

References

1. Guo, Zhang, et al. " Multifunctional microfluidic chip for cancer diagnosis and treatment." Nanotheranostics 5.1 (2021): 73-89.
2. Hsu, Shih, et al. " Bead Number Effect in a Magnetic-Beads-Based Digital Microfluidic Immunoassay." Biosensors 12.5 (2022): 340.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.