Research Profile: Nanofluidic sieves ease separation anxiety

Separation anxiety

Since the discovery of the CTR1 protein kinase and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-localized EIN2 protein nearly 20 y ago, plant biologists have wondered how these proteins respectively serve as negative and positive regulators of ethylene-mediated signal transduction in plants. Now with the publication of four studies, it can be concluded that in the absence of ethylene (ET) in Arabidopsis thal...

Decreasing effective nanofluidic filter size by modulating electrical double layers: separation enhancement in microfabricated nanofluidic filters.

Conventional methods for separating biomolecules are based on steric interactions between the biomolecules and randomly oriented gel fibers. The recently developed artificial molecular sieves also rely on steric interactions for separation. In this work, we present an experimental investigation of a method that can be used in these sieves to increase separation selectivity and resolution. This ...

Separation of chiral particles in micro- or nanofluidic channels.

We propose a method to separate enantiomers in microfluidic or nanofluidic channels. It requires flow profiles that break chiral symmetry and have regions with high local shear. Such profiles can be generated in channels confined by walls with different hydrodynamic boundary conditions (e.g., slip lengths). Because of a nonlinear hydrodynamic effect, particles with different chirality migrate a...

Nanofluidic Molecular Filters for Size-Separation of Biomolecules

Micro/nanofluidic molecular sieving structures[1] have great potential for faster molecular separation. However, their use has been largely limited to big molecules such as DNA, since it is rather challenging to fabricate structures with near-molecular dimensions. We present a novel separation method using nanofluidic filters, which is based on the steric hindrance effect of molecules[2-4]. Whe...

Separation anxiety: an overview.