Simultaneous Concentration and Separation of Proteins in a Nanochannel

摘要

Molecular separation technologies, such as gel electrophoresis and liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry detection, have been the foundations of biomarker discovery. This is because medically significant biomarkers, for example in blood, can be as much as 10~(12)-fold less common than the most abundant protein, albumin, and detecting these low-abundance molecules requires high sensitivity and selective depletion of the dominant species. Conventional approaches, including antibody depletion, remove selected molecules by less than three orders of magnitude only. This limitation prevents the isolation, characterization, and discovery of millions of new proteins where key disease markers could be identified. Overcoming this barrier requires new approaches to analytical detection that minimize sample preprocessing steps while achieving high throughput with very high levels of sensitivity.