Thermally-Triggered Effervescent Mixing for Assay Automation

18 September 2018, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Meltable barriers are an attractive means to achieve controlled delivery of reagents in a variety of settings, enabling assays to be performed through thermal automation instead of manual addition of reactants. However, mixing kinetics in such systems can be slow due to the lack of active flow or mechanical shaking. We demonstrate a new strategy for hands-free, thermally-automated agitation of biochemical reactions. Reagents for binary effervescent reactions are lyophilized then capped with a phase-change partition, eicosane. This barrier can be melted at moderate temperatures, at which point an aqueous solution dissolves the reactants, generating bubbles that mix the solution through convection. We explore reactions that generate bubbles of carbon dioxide and oxygen gasses, characterizing the induced mixing rate of two aqueous solutions with dissimilar densities. This strategy affords control over the initiation and duration of convective mixing, providing a tool for thermal automation of biochemical reactions with efficient reaction kinetics.

Keywords

point-of-care
phase-change partition
Portable Analysis

Supplementary materials

Title
Description
Actions
Title
Thermally-triggered effervescent mixing for assay automation ChemRxiv SI
Description
Actions

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.