Rapid Peptide Reagent Isolation in a Disposable Microfluidic Cartridge

摘要

In this collaborative development project, the challenges in affinity reagent isolation were addressed by combining two seemingly disjoint technologies-biosynthetic display libraries and microfluidic systems. To isolate optimal ligands from these libraries, our project developed an automated magnetic bacterial cell sorting system, termed micromagnetic cell sorter (MMS), to screen microbial libraries with unprecedented throughput using a disposable microfluidic cartridge. We report on the sorting system performance in rare cell and ultra-rare cell recovery (populations less than 0.001%), and compare the results to the standard manual method, magnetic activated cell Sorting (MACS). To demonstrate the system effectiveness in reagent isolation through sorting against an anthrax toxin target, protective antigen was performed and comparable results to standard screening methods were obtained. In addition, the good recovery performance through MMS selection yielded a consensus sequence among 24 unique binders.