Biological assays usually suffer from diffusion limited reaction kinetics therefore excess reagents and prolonged incubation times are employed. This doesn’t only decrease the efficiency of the assays, but also it causes the waste of the excess reagents and thereby assays can be quite costly. In this study, we propose a novel method; electrokinetic mixing (EKM) in electrode-embedded multiwell plates (EEMPs). This is such an innovation, turning the multiwell plates, which didn’t receive a major innovation in more than half a century into smart devices. EKM can induce either symmetric or chaotic mixing of the assay reagents in the wells of an EEMP that can be controlled by a square wave voltage generator. Thus, EKM as a new technology for bioassay platforms can reduce the incubation times and the amount of the reagents utilizing EEMPs. Among demonstrated studies, EKM could dramatically reduce incubation times, by approximately up to 5 times (A1c immunoassay for glycated hemoglobin). On the other hand, EKM could also improve the reagent utilization and thus cost of assays. Namely, when the quantity of the A1c assay reagents was reduced by half, almost no distinguishable signals could be obtained with the conventional immunoassay (no mixing), whereas EKM facilitated acquisition of signals with above baseline intensities. Besides the studied assays, recently, we have been working on EKM assisted cancer cell staining in EEMPs as well. Calcein-AM staining of Jurkat cells could be expedited by approximately 6 times compared to no-mixing case without affecting the cell viabilities. Therefore, we believe the underlying technology of EKM in EEMPs has a potential to vastly improve a broad range of bioassay platforms so that rapid, accurate, cost efficient, non-invasive and high throughput analyses may be achieved.

Electrokinetic mixing (EKM) for improving the kinetics of biomedical and bioanalytical applications in electrode-embedded multiwell plates

2019 Fall National Meeting

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