(351c) Polymer Nanogels and Networks for Bioanalytical Devices

My group at Northwestern has created a varied family of well-tailored polymeric materials designed to enable the creation of powerful, integrated microfluidic electrophoresis devices for DNA and protein separations. Recently, we have shown that certain polymer networks made by solution polymerization can provide ultra-fast DNA sequencing (600 bases of high-quality sequence in just 6 minutes in each microchannel) by a novel, hybrid mechanism of separation that we infer from single-molecule videomicroscopy studies. Other polymer networks, based on polyacrylamide nanogels (200 nm in radius) we create by inverse emulsion polymerization, give DNA separations that are superior to what is provided by linear polymer networks; we have been working to create thermo-responsive nanogels based on random N,N-dialkylacrylamide copolymers, and some examples will be provided. Block copolymers of polyacrylamide with small amounts (< 0.5 mol%) of the very hydrophobic monomer N,N-dihexylacrylamide, made by micellar polymerization methods, also offer substantial improvements in DNA separation, and can serve double-duty to enable electrophoretic DNA purification by adsorbing the ubiquitous and hydrophobic serum albumin proteins found in blood samples. An outlook for the creation of functional and truly integrated microfluidic devices for bioanalytical applications will be given.