Automated on-disc total RNA extraction from whole blood towards point-of-care for early-stage diagnostics

摘要

We present a novel integrated, centrifugo-pneumaticudmicro-homogenizer (“μHomogenizer”) for automatedudsample preparation and total RNA extraction from wholeudblood. Using a Trizol based protocol, this noveludμHomogenizer efficiently lyses whole blood spiked withudE. coli, retains the organic-mixed fraction and yields theudaqueous phase with the total RNA content. By theudinterplay of microfluidic design and a protocol ofudrotational frequencies, we concatenate (and parallelize) audsequence of five subsequent liquid handling operationsudthat complete in less than 10 minutes. A comparison ofudthe total nucleotide content yields similar performance asudconventional, essentially manual off-disc sampleudpreparation methods.