In this paper, we are working toward a problem of great importance to global health: determination of viral HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) loads under point-of-care and resource limited settings. While antiretroviral treatments are becoming widely available, viral load must be evaluated at regular intervals to prevent the spread of drug resistance, and requires a quantitative measurement of RNA concentration over a wide dynamic range (from 50 up to 106 molecules/mL for HIV and up to 108 molecules/mL for HCV). “Digital” single molecule measurements are attractive for quantification, but the dynamic range of such systems is typically limited or requires excessive numbers of wells. Here we designed and tested two microfluidic rotational SlipChips to perform multivolume digital RT-PCR (MV digital RT-PCR) experiments with large and tunable dynamic range. These designs were characterized using synthetic control RNA and validated with HIV viral RNA and HCV control viral RNA. The first design contained 160 wells of each of four volumes (125 nL, 25 nL, 5 nL, and 1 nL) to achieve a dynamic range of 5.2×102 – 4.0×106 molecules/mL at 3-fold resolution. The second design tested the flexibility of this approach, and further expanded it to allow for multiplexing while maintaining a large dynamic range by adding additional wells with volumes of 0.2 nL and 625 nL, and dividing the SlipChip into five regions to analyze five samples each at a dynamic range of 1.8×103 – 1.2×107 molecules/mL at 3-fold resolution. No evidence of cross-contamination was observed. The multiplexed SlipChip can be used to analyze a single sample at dynamic range of 1.7×102 – 2.0×107 molecules/mL at 3-fold resolution with limit of detection of 40 molecules/mL. HIV viral RNA purified from clinical samples were tested on the SlipChip, and viral load results were self-consistent and in good agreement with results determined using the Roche COBAS® AmpliPrep/COBAS® TaqMan® HIV-1 Test. With further validation, this SlipChip should become useful to precisely quantify viral HIV and HCV RNA for high-performance diagnostics in resource-limited settings. These microfluidic designs should also be valuable for other diagnostic and research applications, including detecting rare cells and rare mutations, prenatal diagnostics, monitoring residual disease, and quantifying copy number variation and gene expression patterns. The theory for the design and analysis of multivolume digital PCR experiments is presented in an accompanying paper by Kreutz et al (Anal. Chem. 2011).

In this paper, digital quantitative detection of nucleic acids was achieved at the single-molecule level by chemical initiation of over one thousand sequence-specific, nanoliter, isothermal amplification reactions in parallel. Digital polymerase chain reaction (digital PCR), a method used for quantification of nucleic acids, counts the presence or absence of amplification of individual molecules. However it still requires temperature cycling, which is undesirable under resource-limited conditions. This makes isothermal methods for nucleic acid amplification, such as recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA), more attractive. A microfluidic digital RPA SlipChip is described here for simultaneous initiation of over one thousand nL-scale RPA reactions by adding a chemical initiator to each reaction compartment with a simple slipping step after instrument-free pipette loading. Two designs of the SlipChip, two-step slipping and one-step slipping, were validated using digital RPA. By using the digital RPA SlipChip, false positive results from pre-initiation of the RPA amplification reaction before incubation were eliminated. End-point fluorescence readout was used for “yes or no” digital quantification. The performance of digital RPA in a SlipChip was validated by amplifying and counting single molecules of the target nucleic acid, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) genomic DNA. The digital RPA on SlipChip was also tolerant to fluctuations of the incubation temperature (37–42 °C), and its performance was comparable to digital PCR on the same SlipChip design. The digital RPA SlipChip provides a simple method to quantify nucleic acids without requiring thermal cycling or kinetic measurements, with potential applications in diagnostics and environmental monitoring under resource-limited settings. The ability to initiate thousands of chemical reactions in parallel on the nanoliter scale using solvent-resistant glass devices is likely to be useful for a broader range of applications.

The SlipChip platform was tested to perform high throughput nanoliter multiplex PCR. The advantages of using the SlipChip platform for multiplex PCR include the ability to preload arrays of dry primers, instrument-free sample manipulation, small sample volume, and high throughput capacity. The SlipChip was designed to preload one primer pair per reaction compartment, and to screen up to 384 different primer pairs with less than 30 nanoliters of sample per reaction compartment. Both a 40-well and a 384-well design of the SlipChip were tested for multiplex PCR. In the geometries used here, the sample fluid was spontaneously compartmentalized into discrete volumes even before slipping of the two plates of the SlipChip, but slipping introduced additional capabilities that made devices more robust and versatile. The wells of this SlipChip were designed to overcome potential problems associated with thermal expansion. By using circular wells filled with oil and overlapping them with square wells filled with the aqueous PCR mixture, a droplet of aqueous PCR mixture was always surrounded by the lubricating fluid. In this design, during heating and thermal expansion, only oil was expelled from the compartment and leaking of the aqueous solution was prevented. Both 40-well and 384-well devices were found to be free from cross-contamination, and end point fluorescence detection provided reliable readout. Multiple samples could also be screened on the same SlipChip simultaneously. Multiplex PCR was validated on the 384-well SlipChip with 20 different primer pairs to identify 16 bacterial and fungal species commonly presented in blood infections. The SlipChip correctly identified five different bacterial or fungal species in separate experiments. In addition, the presence of the resistance gene mecA in methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was identified. The SlipChip will be useful for applications involving PCR arrays, and lays the foundation for new strategies for diagnostics, point-of-care devices, and immobilization based arrays.

Previously we have found that elongation factor 2 (EF-2) from mammalian cells can be phosphorylated by a special Caz'/ calmodulin-dependent protein kinase (EF-2 kinase). Phosphorylation results in complete inactivation of EF-2 in the poly(U)-directed cell-free translation system. However, the partial function of EF-2 at&ted by phosphorylation remained unknown. Here we show that phosphorylated EF-2, unlike non-phosphorylated EF-2, is unable to switch ribosomes carrying poly(U) and Phe-tRNA in the A site to a puromycin-reactive state. Thus, phosphorylation of EF-2 seems to block its ability to promote a shift of the aminoacyl(peptidyl)-tRNA from the A site to the P site, i.e. translocation itself.

The major core protein of cytoplasmic messenger ribonucleoprotein particles (p50) has been shown previously to inhibit protein synthesis in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, p50 is highly homologous to the Y-boxbinding transcription factor family of proteins, binds DNA containing the Y-box motif, and thus may have a dual function in cells as a regulator of both transcription and translation. Here we show that binding or removal of p50 from rabbit reticulocyte lysate by monospecific antibodies to p50 strongly inhibits translation of endogenous and exogenous globin mRNAs as well as prokaryotic ␤-galactosidase mRNA in a rabbit reticulocyte cell-free system. Thus, depending on the conditions, p50 not only may act as a translational repressor, but may also be required for protein synthesis. Translation inhibition with anti-p50 antibodies is not a result of mRNA degradation or its functional inactivation. The inhibition does not change the ribosome transit time, and therefore, it does not affect elongation/termination of polypeptide chains. The inhibition with anti-p50 antibodies is followed by a decay of polysomes and accumulation of the 48 S preinitiation complex. These results suggest that p50 participates in initiation of protein biosynthesis. Although uninvolved in the formation of the 48 S preinitiation complex, p50 is necessary either for attachment of the 60 S ribosomal subunit or for previous 5 -untranslated region scanning by the 43 S preinitiation complex.