A novel nanoliter liquid dispensing technology for protein crystallization

Author

Liu, Yaxin ; Chen, Liguo ; Sun, Lining

Author_Institution

Harbin Inst. of Technol., Harbin

fYear

2007

fDate

2-5 Aug. 2007

Firstpage

1189

Lastpage

1194

Abstract

Recently, high-throughput protein crystallization requires the ability to transfer submicroliter volumes of sample with a large range of viscosities. In this paper, a solenoid-based non-contact liquid handling instrument with high-speed flow sensor was developed to meet this requirement. The flow sensor-driven dispenser with feedback control automatically compensates for encountered differences or changes in sample viscosity by adjusting the valve opening time or system pressure. Also, the non-contact liquid dispensing process was investigated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, which make us understand the droplet breakup process in more detail and make dispensing nanoliter droplet fall off successfully without attach to the nozzle. Experiments were carried out with different dispensing volumes, coefficient of variance (CV) has been shown to be below 3% at 1 mul and approach 8% at 50 nl.

Keywords

bioMEMS; computational fluid dynamics; crystallisation; drops; nanobiotechnology; proteins; viscosity; computational fluid dynamics models; droplet breakup process; feedback control; high-speed flow; nanoliter droplet; nanoliter liquid dispensing technology; noncontact liquid handling instrument; protein crystallization; viscosity; Computational fluid dynamics; Crystallization; Instruments; Nanotechnology; Proteins; Robustness; Sensor systems; Solenoids; Valves; Viscosity; Flow sensor; MEMS; computational fluid dynamics (CFD); non-contact liquid dispensing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Nanotechnology, 2007. IEEE-NANO 2007. 7th IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Hong Kong

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-0607-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-0608-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NANO.2007.4601396

Filename

4601396