MALDI Microfluidics

Microfluidic chips are small devices with systems of micrometer sized channels etched into glass, silicon, or molded in plastic. The channels are enclosed by bonding to a flat substrate. Various microfluidic components have been developed to perform valving, mixing, filtering, electrophoresis, liquid chromatography, polymerase chain reaction and other procedures. Sample transport is typically by electroosmosis and/or electrophoresis. In analogy to electronic integrated circuits, multiple components can be combined to form microscale total analysis systems. The advantages of such devices compared to conventional chemical analysis include low cost, small size, low sample consumption, high sensitivity, and rapid analysis.

The rotating ball inlet is a continuous MALDI interface in which the ball transports the matrix and analyte deposit to the laser. The deposition can be done at atmospheric pressure with the ball acting as a vacuum seal.

The capillary gel chip used the infrared laser with no added matrix to desorb and ionize directly from the gel.

• Ambient laser ablation sampling for capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry
• Development of an Automated Digestion and Droplet Deposition Microfluidic Chip for MALDI-TOF MS
• Ultra sensitive affinity chromatography on avidin-functionalized PMMA microchip for low abundant post-translational modified protein enrichment
• A solid-phase bioreactor with continuous sample deposition for matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry
• Continuous flow infrared matrix‐assisted laser desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry
• Development of an efficient on-chip digestion system for protein analysis using MALDI-TOF MS
• Microfluidics with MALDI analysis for proteomics
• Microfluidic chips for mass spectrometry-based proteomics