Protein Separations

This chapter describes the use of two types of commercialized microfluidic chips for protein separation, suitable for personal scale and high-throughput use. Compared with conventional approaches, such as sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and capillary electrophoresis (CE), these devices offer the advantages of faster separation times, better data reproducibility, greater ease of use, labor savings in quantitative analysis, and ease in data archiving and data sharing owing to the digital data format. With some simple precautions taken to keep bubbles and particulates out of the microchannels, Lab-on-a-Chip devices have been adopted by many researchers in protein processing, protein engineering, and proteomics research laboratories to increase their productivity.