Iwohn, M. J. / Seifermann, M. / Reiser, P. / Höpfner, J. / El Khaled El Faraj, R. / Heißler, S. / Popova, A.A. / Levkin, P.A. (2023)

Advanced Materials Interfaces, 2023, doi:10.1002/admi.202300227

Abstract

Immobilization of oligonucleotides on solid surfaces is an important step in many experimental workflows in biology, such as gene expression analysis, genotyping, and drug discoveries. Capturing oligonucleotides in a highly efficient miniaturized format is still challenging. In this work, preparation of functionalized miniaturized acrylamide hydrogels on a droplet microarray (DMA) chip is reported. By further modification of these hydrogels through the Cu-catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition, oligonucleotides are attached covalently, creating the OligoHydrogelArray (OHA). OHA enables the hybridization of oligonucleotides with defined sequences in a parallelized, miniaturized, and high-throughput manner with an overall loading capacity and extraction efficiency suitable for most biological and chemical applications. This system enables the parallelized solid-phase extraction of target oligonucleotides out of a mixture for purification and enrichment of DNA/RNA/PNA for application in fields such as transcriptomics. In the current study, are establish the chemical procedure for reproducible preparation of OHA and determine key characteristics, such as height, diameter, and shape of miniaturized gel pads as well as the loading capacity of oligonucleotides within the material. Finally, the ability to extract complementary oligonucleotide strands out of solution through hybridization is demonstrated to set the course for future applications.

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