Adsorption and elution characteristics of nucleic acids on silica surfaces and their use in designing a miniaturized purification unit.

We report nucleic acid (NA) adsorption isotherms and elution profiles for silica surfaces and use these to design a miniaturized NA purification unit based on solid-phase extraction with silica beads. The procedure is based on a pressure drop equation for flow through a packed bed and allows estimation of key design parameters such as channel dimensions, liquid flow rates, sample volume, and amount of silica needed. The usefulness of this design procedure is demonstrated by applying it to a column-based NA purification device for influenza detection for a case study of Madin-Darby canine kidney cells infected with influenza A virus.