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Creative Biolabs is an undoubted pioneer in the field of microfluidic chips development. Based on our comprehensive microfluidic platform and professional staff, we are dedicated to designing and developing high-quality microfluidic chips for isothermal nucleic acid amplification for straightforward, robust nucleic acid detection.

Isothermal Nucleic Acid Amplification on Microfluidic Chips

To date, many isothermal nucleic acid amplification techniques have been integrated with miniaturized and/or portable devices such as microfluidic chips for nucleic acid detection. Isothermal nucleic acid amplification overcomes many shortcomings of PCR-based amplification, such as the high denaturation temperature and tedious three-step thermal cycling of samples between different temperature zones for amplification. Among all isothermal amplification strategies, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is the most popular one because it can rapidly amplify DNA fragment with high specificity and sensitivity under isothermal conditions, and transform such a recognition event to a visible signal. Thus, LAMP plays an important role in the detection of nucleic acid in integrated microfluidic platforms.

Besides, the structure of developed chips for isothermal nucleic acid amplification offers significant advantages for use in general laboratories, such as isothermal temperature, low energy consumption, process automation and integration, time-saving, and cost-effective. Based on the miniaturized size, precise microfluidic control, and automation of the operation, a single chip enables the integration of the necessary processes without requiring thermal cycling to reduce reagent consumption and manual handling errors, and yield greatly enhanced analytical performances. The developed microfluidic chips could provide a novel platform for the biological molecules by making use of LAMP to detect nucleic acid molecules. Therefore, microfluidic chips can be applied to a wide range of biological research areas, including single-molecule DNA sequencing, genetic study, non-invasive diagnosis, multigene analysis of pathogen, and even early diagnosis of cancer.

Fig. 1 Single-cell genomic DNA amplification and barcoding.^1,2

Microfluidic Chips Development for Isothermal Nucleic Acid Amplification

In some researches, new microfluidic chips for LAMP have been developed with different characteristics. For example, a completely valve-free and self-priming compartmentalization device used for LAMP is made mainly with PDMS and is vacuum packaged. The pressure difference of the air dissolved in the PDMS provides power source, thus, sample and oil are sequentially sucked into the channels and microwells. It not only creates thousands of independent microwells automatically without using microvalves but also avoids the use of any outer power source for partitioning solutions individual microwells. This chip is functionalized with rapid DNA release, exponential signal amplification, and direct naked eye result read-out in a single and multiplexed format. This integrated chip is straightforward in manipulation to be highly portable for on-site analysis and capable of detecting target nucleic acids quantitatively with high sensitivity, specificity, and rapidity.

Powerful and straightforward isothermal nucleic acid amplification is an attractive method for detecting nucleic acids because of its isothermal process and high specificity. By combination isothermal nucleic acid amplification and microfluidic technology, scientists at Creative Biolabs can design the best-fit microfluidic chips to miniaturize the isothermal nucleic acid amplification detection system and facilitate the realization of POC detection. We can offer microfluidic chips for all types of commonly used isothermal amplification technologies, including but not limited to:

• LAMP,
• helicase-dependent isothermal DNA amplification (HDA),
• recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA),
• nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA),
• transcription-mediated amplification (TMA),
• rolling circle amplification (RCA),
• and strand displacement amplification (SDA).

Our customized microfluidic chips could show the potential usefulness and overcome the problem of contamination in conventional isothermal amplification. We believe that this rapid and convenient isothermal amplification on microfluidic chips can be adopted into many practices such as POC diagnostic assays without resorting to complex instrumentation.

With our years of experience and microfluidic technology platform, Creative Biolabs provides the customized design service for microfluidic chips of isothermal nucleic acid amplification to meet our customers' specific objectives in a time-saving manner. For more detailed information, please feel free to contact us.

References

1. Pellegrino, Sciambi, et al. " High-throughput single-cell DNA sequencing of acute myeloid leukemia tumors with droplet microfluidics." Genome Research 28 (2018): 1345-1352.
2. under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.