Session S5 - Laser Ablation of Biological and Polymeric Materials.
INVITED session, Wednesday afternoon, March 24
524AB, Palais des Congres
Microfluidic technology is ideal for processing precious samples of limited volumes. Some of the most important classes of biological samples are both high in sample complexity and low in concentration. Combining the elements of sample pre-concentration, chemical separation and high sensitivity detection with chemical identification is essential for realizing a functional microfluidic based analysis system.
Direct write UV laser ablation has been used to rapidly fabricate microfluidic devices capable of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-MS. These chip-LC/MS devices use bio-compatible, solvent resistant and flexible polymer materials such as polyimide. A novel microfluidic to rotary valve interface enables, leak free, high pressure fluid switching between multiple ports of the microfluidic chip-LC/MS device. Electrospray tips with outer dimension of 50 um and inner of 15 um are formed by ablating the polymer material concentrically around a multilayer laminated channel structure.
Biological samples of digested proteins were used to evaluate the performance of these microfluidic devices. Liquid chromatography separation and similar sample pretreatments have been performed using polymeric microfluidic devices with on-chip separation channels. Mass spectrometry was performed using an Agilent Technologies 1100 series ion trap mass spectrometer. Low fmol amounts of protein samples were positively and routinely identified by searching the MS/MS spectral data against protein databases. The sensitivity and separation performance of the chip-LC devices has been found to be comparable to state of the art nano-electrospray systems.