Improving Lab-on-a-Chip

Agilent Technologies of Palo Alto, Calif., http://www.agilent.com has upped the ante in microfluidics-based gel electrophoresis. The company's new 5100 Automated Lab-on-a-Chip Platform (ALP) integrates the process of resolving both nucleic acids and proteins – including sample handling, injection, separation, staining, and detection – into a single 5.5-cm² chip that can process 6,000 samples before being replaced.

A high-throughput implementation of the technology underlying the company's popular 2100 Bioanalyzer, the 5100 ALP can run up to 4,608 samples overnight, with run times of one minute per sample at full capacity (twice as fast as the 2100 system). Unlike the manually loaded 2100, the 5100 ALP uses capillaries to load samples from twelve 96- or 384-well plates. Agilent currently sells compatible kits for quality control and screening of PCR fragments and identification and analysis of proteins.

Carsten Buhlmann, Agilent's product manager for lab-on-a-chip assays, says the new system...