Efficient and reliable manipulation of biological particles is crucial in medical diagnosis and chemical synthesis. Inertial microfluidic devices utilizing passive hydrodynamic forces in the secondary flow have drawn considerable attention for their high throughputs, low costs, and harmless particle manipulation. However, as the dominant mechanism, the inertial lift force is difficult to quantitatively analyze because of the uncertainties of its magnitude and direction. The equilibrium position of particles varies along the migration process, thus inducing the instabilities of particle separation. Herein, we present a designable inertial microfluidic chip combining a spiral channel with periodic expansion structures for the sheathless separation of particles with different sizes. The stable vortex-induced lift force arising from the periodic expansion and the Dean drag force significantly enhanced the focusing process and determined the final equilibrium position. The experimental results showed that over 99% of target particles could be isolated with the high target sample purity of 86.12%. In the biological experiment, 93.5% of the MCF-7, 89.5% of the Hela, and 88.6% of the A549 cells were steadily recovered with excellent viabilities to verify the potential of the device in dealing with biological particles over a broad range of throughputs. The device presented in this study can further serve as a lab-on-chip platform for liquid biopsy and diagnostic analysis.

This paper reports the synthesis and characterization of metal-binding indicators with diverse optical responses on exposure to various heavy metal ions. A combinatorial approach, based on azo coupling of diazonium salts with either phenolic compounds or aromatic amines, generated a library of azo dyes. Each reaction mixture, containing the product(s) of azo coupling, was incubated with a series of solutions, each containing a different heavy metal ion. The absorbance and, in some cases, fluorescence spectra of the resulting complexes were recorded. The metal chelates showed extensive diversity in their UV-visible absorbance spectra upon binding to selected metal ions. Of the azo dyes prepared, the terdentate dyes were particularly useful, providing distinct spectral responses to three or more metal ions in a panel of seven.

Melamine, a nitrogen-rich molecule, was found as an adulterant in pet foods in 2007 in North America and in milk products in 2008 in China. These scandalous abuses of melamine have alarmed the biopharmaceutical industry and the FDA and alerted them to potential adulteration and contamination of melamine in raw materials used to make protein therapeutics. Highly sensitive analytical methods are needed to screen melamine adulteration and contamination in raw materials. We conducted surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) experiments to test trace melamine spiked in three raw materials commonly used for protein pharmaceutical formulation and purification, including sucrose, urea, and arginine, with a portable Raman device and gold nanoparticles. The detection limit of 10 ppb in raw material dissolved in 30:70% water/acetonitrile is equivalent to 0.5 ppm in solid raw material. It has excellent linearity in the concentration range measured. The cross-validation regression coefficient R(2) and the standard error of prediction (SEP) are 0.960 and 7.18 ppb, respectively, in sucrose. The R(2) and SEP are 0.958 and 9.15 ppb in urea. It has a relatively lower R(2) = 0.630 and a SEP of 35.0 ppb in arginine, which could be due to the competitive adsorption of arginine molecules to the surfaces of gold nanoparticles. The detection of melamine using the SERS technique is rapid (within 3 minutes), convenient, and requires no extraction procedure, offering an alternative method for screening melamine in raw materials at biopharmaceutical manufacture sites.

In this paper, a unique probe was developed based on quantum dots, nanogold and EGF. The sensing section of the probe was developed by linking the streptavidin-labeled QD and monomaleimide-functionalized nanogoldviaa substrate peptide. The activity of caspase-3 was successfully monitored during a longer time span compared to the reported probes.

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