Microfluidic Array Liquid Chromatography: A Proof of Principle Study

Abstract Miniaturization of separation techniques can minimize consumption of solvent and requirement of sample size and leads to high efficiency, high speed, high resolution and high throughput analysis. In this study, a microfluidic chip-based array liquid chromatographic platform enabling multicolumn separation and detection was developed. The platform is based on the combination of glass, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chips and up to 8 packed chromatographic channels were manufactured on such a microfluidic device. Pressurization experiments showed that the array chip could be reliably used under pressure-driven liquid chromatographic mode. A nanoflow of 300 nL min –1 per column was realized through multi-stage flow splitting. We investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of 8 column array chip and obtained a high efficiency of 80000 plates per meter and a RSD of 1.1% for the retention time. Using a protein digest as the sample, we also explored the potential applicability of the chip in high throughput separation of complex biomolecules.