Liquid dielectrophoresis dispensing of vesicles for on-chip nucleic acid isolation and detection

Lipid bilayer membranes in biological cells are an essential component of cellular infrastructure and furthermore responsible for various transductional afunctionalities. Synthetic lipid membranes can be deposited as supported lipid bilayer (SLB) on functionalized solid surfaces or, as large bilayer lipid vesicles (BLV). Such artificial lipid membranes can serve as fundamental building blocks and models for mimicking biological membrane interfaces, which maybe leveraged for chip based bio-sensor applications. In this paper, we have utilized liquid dielectrophoresis (L-DEP) based droplet microfluidic (DMF) methodology to dispense, multitude of precisely positioned SLB and BLV membranes, over the size range of: 2.8–100 μm, in an on-chip rapid, multiplexed dispensing process, not readily achieved by conventional dispensing methods. The deposited SLB and BLV assemblies have been utilized to demonstrate nucleic acid isolation and hybridization assays, using a Q-Dot® nano-particles FRET analysis.