Aptamers are single-stranded oligonucleotides of DNA or RNA that bind to target molecules with high affinity and specificity. Typically, aptamers are generated by an iterative selection process, called systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX). Recent advancements in SELEX technology have extended aptamer selection from comparatively simple mixtures of purified proteins ...

Since only a small fraction of environmental bacteria are amenable to laboratory culture, there is great interest in genomic sequencing directly from single cells. Sufficient DNA for sequencing can be obtained from one cell by the Multiple Displacement Amplification (MDA) method, thereby eliminating the need to develop culture methods. Here we used a microfluidic device to isolate individual Es...

Microfluidic cell-based arraying technology is widely used in the field of single-cell analysis. However, among developed devices, there is a compromise between cellular loading efficiencies and trapped cell densities, which deserves further analysis and optimization. To address this issue, the cell trapping efficiency of a microfluidic device with two parallel micro channels interconnected wit...

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model organism in genetic research and drug screening because of its relative simplicity, ease of maintenance, amenability to simple genetic manipulation, and relevance to human biology. However, their small size and mobility make nematodes difficult to physically manipulate, particularly with spatial and temporal precision. We have developed ...

Standard additions is a calibration technique devised to eliminate rotational matrix effects in analytical measurement. Although the technique is presented in almost every textbook of analytical chemistry, its behaviour in practice is not well documented and is prone to attract misleading accounts. The most important limitation is that the method cannot deal with translational matrix effects, w...