Recently, Ph.D. student Ruihua Tang from BEBC has published his first author research paper in Microchimica acta entitled " Paper-based device with on-chip reagent storage for rapid extraction of DNA from biological samples".

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) represents an important biomarker in a wide range of applications at point-of-care (POC). DNA is usually present in complex biological samples (e.g., whole blood, saliva, urine, bacteria), an extraction step is essential for most downstream analysis. However, conventional methods for extraction of DNA are expensive, time-consuming and tedious. To overcome these limitations, a paper-based DNA extraction device was developed that incorporated sponge-based buffer storage, a paper-based valve and channels of different length to autonomously direct the reagent and sample to the Fusion 5 disk for DNA capturing. With this device, DNA can be extracted within 2 min from only 30 μL samples of whole blood, serum, breast cancer cell, saliva, sputum and bacterial suspension. The device can also extract Hepatitis B Virus DNA from clinical blood samples and after quantification shows a detection limit as low as 10⁴ copies⋅mL^-1. This highlights its potential use in future diagnostics. The performance of the device was similar to that of the commercial QIAamp DNA micro kits and the FTA card. In our perception, this simple, inexpensive, portable and disposable device holds great promise in terms of POC testing in resource-poor settings.

The work is under the guidance of Feng Xu Professor. The co-authors of the paper include Jane Ru Choi, Yan Gong, Jie Hu, Ting Wen, XiuJun Li, Bo Xu, Hui Yang, QibingMei, Feng Xu.

Article link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00604-017-2225-0