Mixing subattolitre volumes in a quantitative and highly parallel manner with soft matter nanofluidics
Mixing subattolitre volumes in a quantitative and highly parallel manner with soft matter nanofluidics
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DOI：
10.1038/nnano.2011.185
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发表时间：
2012-01-01
影响因子：
38.3
通讯作者：
Stamou, Dimitrios
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Christensen, Sune M.;Bolinger, Pierre-Yves;Stamou, Dimitrios
并行处理和混合超小体积的反应物可以提高筛选测定的通量(1,2) 和复杂性(3)，同时减少试剂消耗(1)。微加工硅和塑料可以提供可靠的流体装置(4-8)，但通常不能处理小于 1 x 10(-12) l 的总体积。自组装软物质纳米容器 (9-16) 原则上可以显着提高小型化和生物相容性，但由于其尺寸较小，充分发挥其潜力是一项挑战 (17)。在这里，我们证明小型单层脂质囊泡可用于以可重复且高度并行的方式混合小至 1 x 10(-19) l 的体积。自封闭纳米反应器用相反电荷的脂质进行功能化，以实现可靠的融合。封装一组反应物的单个囊泡被固定在玻璃表面上，然后与携带一组互补反应物的具有相反电荷的扩散囊泡融合。我们发现，大约 85% 的类似 1 x 10(6) cm(-2) 表面束缚纳米反应器经历非确定性融合，在所有情况下都是无泄漏的，并且该系统允许每个纳米反应器最多三到四个连续混合事件。
Handling and mixing ultrasmall volumes of reactants in parallel can increase the throughput(1,2) and complexity(3) of screening assays while simultaneously reducing reagent consumption(1). Microfabricated silicon and plastic can provide reliable fluidic devices(4-8), but cannot typically handle total volumes smaller than similar to 1 x 10(-12) l. Self-assembled soft matter nanocontainers(9-16) can in principle significantly improve miniaturization and biocompatibility, but exploiting their full potential is a challenge due to their small dimensions(17). Here, we show that small unilamellar lipid vesicles can be used to mix volumes as small as 1 x 10(-19) l in a reproducible and highly parallelized fashion. The self-enclosed nanoreactors are functionalized with lipids of opposite charge to achieve reliable fusion. Single vesicles encapsulating one set of reactants are immobilized on a glass surface and then fused with diffusing vesicles of opposite charge that carry a complementary set of reactants. We find that similar to 85% of the similar to 1 x 10(6) cm(-2) surface-tethered nanoreactors undergo non-deterministic fusion, which is leakage-free in all cases, and the system allows up to three to four consecutive mixing events per nanoreactor.