Automated on-disc total RNA extraction from whole blood towards point-of-care for early stage diagnostics

We present a novel integrated, centrifugo-pneumatic micro-homogenizer (“μHomogenizer”) for automated sample preparation and total RNA extraction from whole blood. Using a Trizol based protocol, this novel μHomogenizer efficiently lyses whole blood spiked with E. coli, retains the organic-mixed fraction and yields the aqueous phase with the total RNA content. By the interplay of microfluidic design and a protocol of rotational frequencies, we concatenate (and parallelize) a sequence of five subsequent liquid handling operations that complete in less than 10 minutes. A comparison of the total nucleotide content yields similar performance as conventional, essentially manual off-disc sample preparation methods.