Comparison of the Performance of Polymer-Based Capillary Electrophoresis Microchips Fabricated by Using Resist Molds Prepared by Synchrotron Radiation Lithography and Ultraviolet Light Lithography

摘要

An integration of capillary electrophoresis (CE) onto planar microchip is one of the largest current research streams in analytical chemistry, due to its high performance separation capability and applicability in genomics, proteomics and metabolomics. In the most reports of microchip-based capillary electrophoresis (MCE) a glass or a piece of quartz as a chip material and wet etching as a fabrication technique were utilized. However, these microchips have disadvantages such as a requirement of high cost fabrication procedure and restricted flexibility of channel dimension determined by isotropic wet etching. On the other hand, polymer microchips fabricated by optical lithography and molding technique have advantages such as low cost fabrication process and flexible choice of channel dimension. In order to fabricate a mold for preparing polymer microchip, generally, ultraviolet light (UV) is used. However, we focused on the synchrotron radiation (SR). SR is a highly collimated beam with high energy and less diffractive property. Thus, fabrication of well-defined resist mold, i.e., channel on polymer microchip, is expected. Accordingly, major purposes of this work are the fabrication of polymer-based microchips by resist molds prepared by SR and UV lithography and the comparison of sample dispersion profiles between SR-based and UV-based microchips. In addition, improvement of sample dispersion profile by using tapered microchannel will also be shown.