Re-use of commercial microfluidics chips for DNA, RNA, and protein electrophoresis

Abstract

Microfluidics chip technology is a powerful and convenient alternative to agarose gels and PAGE, but costs can be high due to certain chips being non-reusable. Here we describe a method to regenerate, re-use, and store Agilent DNA, RNA, and protein electrophoresis chips designed for use in the Bioanalyzer 2100. By washing the sample wells and displacing the old gel matrix with new gel-dye mix, we have run samples on the same chip up to ten times with negligible loss of signal quality. Chips whose wells were loaded with buffer or water were stored successfully for one week before re-use.