DNA Separations

The use of two types of commercialized microfluidic chips for separation of double-stranded DNA(dsDNA), suitable for personal scale and high throughput use, is described. Compared with conventional approaches such as slab-gel and capillary electrophoresis (CE), these devices offer the advantages of faster separation times, better data reproducibility, greater ease of use, labor savings in quatitative analysis, and ease in data archiving and data sharing owing to the digital data format. With some simple precautions taken in keeping bubbles and particulates out of the microchannels, Lab-on-a-Chip devices have been adopted by many researchers in molecular biology and genomics laboratories to increase their productivity.