Exclusion Based Sample Preparation Enabling Multiple Analyte Interrogation

Sample preparation is critical and necessary in most analytical processes to isolate and enrich components of interest from a sample matrix. While great advances have been made in the detection and analysis of analytes (protein, nucleic acids, etc.) over the past few decades, improvements in sample preparation have been relatively modest, generating a "bottleneck'' in the process workflow. We present a new technology, termed Exclusion-based Sample Preparation (ESP), that relies on "excluding" contaminants from analytes of interest bound to magnetic particles by either moving the magnetic particles, liquid or surface. Many of these unique ESP platforms are enabled by the dominance of surface tension over gravity at the microscale. By removing repetitive, dilutive wash and centrifugation steps we can streamLine sample preparation workflows to create non-laborious and cost effective devices. Here I utilize ESP technology to develop several sample preparation platforms to extract and isolate multiple analytes of interest, such as the protein botulinum neurotoxin Type A for food safety testing and viral HIV RNA for viral load determination. I also exploit an inherent advantage of ESP in that starting sample is never lost or diluted which enables resampling. Using this simple concept we developed an ESP platform to enable multiple analyte interrogation from a single and rare cell population. Using this device, we begin to highlight the potential effectiveness of ESP for biological and clinical applications.