Low Voltage Capillary Electrophoresis Using High Conductivity Agarose Nano-Platinum Composites

Abstract

Micro-channel based electrophoretic separation systems are commonly used in gene sequencing and analysis. A significant amount of research has focused on the development of fast and high resolution separation systems as part of miniaturized genotyping platforms. These devices are not suitable for field deployment due to their high voltage requirements for micro-channel based electrophoresis. In order to address this issue, we have developed and tested a new agarose gel doped with nanoplatinum for conducting capillary electrophoresis in micro capillaries at low electric field values. The platinum nanoparticles reduce the gel resistance of the agarose gels by 3-4 fold. We have further observed a faster movement of DNA band in this novel gel material allowing a reduction of the fractionating electric field within Poly dimethyl Siloxane (PDMS) capillaries. Impedance studies performed on this new gel material indicate a 1.34 times increase in the dielectric constant of the medium as a result of doping by nano-particles and a 37% reduction in the resistance. We believe that the higher conductivity of the medium and an increased dielectric constant of the medium result in increased ionic mobility within this material. We have also compared the stain mobility values in glass PDMS capillaries of a 1 kbp ladder, and a 750 bp dS DNA segment and have successfully obtained electrophoresis within the micro-channels at a lower electric field (25 V/cm).

Enhanced DNA Separation Rates in Nano-Platinum Doped Agarose

“…18 We used imageJ software to analyze the differences in the band area to study the broadening effects and found identically sized bands on both gels using a 1 Kbp ladder. Capillary electrophoresis experiments performed inside PDMS channels using this new material, reported separately, 19 …”

Valence particles and the correction to relativistic mean field binding energy

“…The choice of appropriate Lagrangian density is not unique as there are different variations of the Lagrangian density as well different parametrizations for them in RMF. In [11], we employed two such densities, FSU Gold [14] and NL3 [15], and obtained nearly identical behaviour. Accordingly, most of the results presented here use only the former one.…”

“…Following the method in [11], the effect of the n-p interaction in the difference between the experimental and the theoretical binding energies has been extracted by assuming that, in a nucleus with magic neutron number, this difference is due to the combined effects other than the n-p interaction. As N n is zero in these particular nuclei, the effect of the n-p interaction is expected to be small.…”

“…As was pointed out in [11], the correlations beyond mean field results are due principally to residual two-body interaction. In mean field calculations, while the residual interaction between similar nucleons is taken care of by the introduction of T = 1 pairing, the residual n-p interaction is often ignored.…”

“…In actinides, the only appropriate major doubly closed shell nucleus is 208 Pb and it was necessary to employ subshell closures. In another communication [11], we obtained a more robust systematic behaviour of the contribution of the n-p interaction to binding energy in the even-proton nuclei, valid in a large mass region and dependent only on the known major shell closures. In the present work, we extend our study to odd-proton nuclei.…”