Miniaturized gel electrophoresis system for fast separation of nucleic acids

Slab gel electrophoresis (SGE) is very common tool for DNA, RNA and protein analysis, but it is tedious, labor-intensive, skill-dependent, and relatively slow. Herein, we developed a biochip based SGE system, which can resolve the DNA fragments and record their separation process. By electrophoresis of 50bp DNA ladder, we found that the 16 DNA fragments were effectively resolved within 14min. In order to validate its feasibility and practicability, we take periodontal pathogens (e.g., Porphyromonas gingivalis (P.g), Tannerela forsythia (T.f), and Treponema denticola (T.d)) as an example by separating their polymerase chain reaction products. Experiments demonstrated that P.g, T.d and T.f were diagnosed within 12min, and the electrophoresis of P.g showed that the detection limit of this system was about 6.4ng/μl. Such a low cost system is easy to operate, and can effectively improve SGE in the biological experiment, especially for the labs in the third world countries.