Advanced fluidic handling and use of two-phase flow for high throughput structural investigation of proteins on a microfluidic sample preparation platform

Research on the structure of proteins can bring forth a wealth of information about biological function and can be used to better understand the processes in living cells. This paper reports a new microfluidic sample preparation system for the structural investigation of proteins by Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS).

The system includes hardware and software features for precise fluidic control, synchrotron beamline control, UV absorbance measurements and automated data analysis. The precise fluidic handling capabilities are used to transport and precisely position samples as small as 500 nL into the microfluidic chip’s detection chambers.