Abstract
The use of microfluidic systems for screening of aptamers and their biomedical applications are reviewed in this paper. Aptamers with different nucleic acid sequences have been extensively studied and the results demonstrated a strong binding affinity to target molecules such that they can be used as promising candidate biomarkers for diagnosis and therapeutics. Recently, the aptamer screening protocol has been conducted with microfluidic-based devices. Furthermore, aptamer affinity screening by a microfluidic-based method has demonstrated remarkable advantages over competing traditional methods. In this paper, we first reviewed microfluidic systems which demonstrated efficient and rapid screening of a specific aptamer. Then, the clinical applications of screened aptamers, also performed by microfluidic systems, are further reviewed. These automated microfluidic systems can provide advantages over their conventional counterparts including more compactness, faster analysis, less sample/reagent consumption and automation. An aptamer-based compact microfluidic system for diagnosis may even lead to a point-of-care device. The use of microfluidic systems for aptamer screening and diagnosis is expected to continue growing in the near future and may make a substantial impact on biomedical applications.
Highlights
SELEX is a method to screen single-stranded DNA or RNA ligands from a random library of nucleotide sequences [1]
In order to accelerate this lengthy screening process, a wide variety of microfluidic incubation, separation and amplification techniques have been explored as means to enhance the efficiency of aptamer selection, including capillary electrophoresis (CE), sol-gel isolation and magnetic-bead-based selection have been reported in literature [22,23,24]
It is envisioned that the fully-automated SELEX process on an integrated microfluidic system may provide a user-friendly, efficient and rapid platform for screening aptamers for a variety of biomedical applications
Summary
SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) is a method to screen single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) or RNA ligands from a random library of nucleotide sequences [1]. The unbound nucleic acids are washed away from those bound to the target molecule, which are eluted from the target molecule and amplified by a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) This selection procedure is repeated for several rounds until the resulting sequences are highly enriched. The SELEX technology generates aptamers with a high binding affinity and specificity These advantages have made them very promising in analytical, diagnostic and therapeutic applications [6,7,8,9]. Aptamers are short single-stranded nucleic acid oligomers with a specific and complex three-dimensional structure [10] Based on their three-dimensional structures, aptamers can bind well to a wide variety of targets. Various examples of self-contained, fully integrated, miniaturized devices will be reviewed
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