Search results for "water-in-oil"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Monitoring few molecular binding events in scalable confined aqueous compartments by raster image correlation spectroscopy (CADRICS)
2016
The assembly of scalable liquid compartments for binding assays in array formats constitutes a topic of fundamental importance in life sciences. This challenge can be addressed by mimicking the structure of cellular compartments with biological native conditions. Here, inkjet printing is employed to develop up to hundreds of picoliter aqueous droplet arrays stabilized by oil-confinement with mild surfactants (Tween-20). The aqueous environments constitute specialized compartments in which biomolecules may exploit their function and a wide range of molecular interactions can be quantitatively investigated. Raster Image Correlation Spectroscopy (RICS) is employed to monitor in each compartmen…
Circular dichroism of polynucleotides: Interactions of NiCl2 with poly(dA-dT).poly(dA-dT) and poly(dG-dC).poly(dG-dC) in a water-in-oil microemulsion.
2008
The thermal behavior of the synthetic, high molecular weight, double stranded polynucleotides poly(dA-dT)·poly(dA-dT) [polyAT] and poly(dG-dC)·poly(dG-dC) [polyGC] solubilized in the aqueous core of the quaternary water-in-oil cationic microemulsion CTAB|n-pentanol|n-hexane|water in the presence of increasing amounts of NiCl2 at several constant ionic strength values (NaCl) has been studied by means of circular dichroism and electronic absorption spectroscopies. In the microemulsive medium, both polynucleotides show temperature-induced modifications that markedly vary with both Ni(II) concentration and ionic strength. An increase of temperature causes denaturation of the polyAT duplex at lo…
Natural or synthetic nucleic acids encapsulated in a closed cavity of amphiphiles
2013
In this review some aspects of the interactions of organized structures of amphiphiles with natural or synthetic DNAs are briefly considered. In particular DNAs encapsulated in closed cavities of amphiphiles, specifically giant vesicles and water-in-oil droplets and reverse micelles, are dealt with. Two main applications of giant vesicles are reviewed in detail, namely their use as microreactors where reactions can be followed by optical microscopy on a single vesicle and in synthetic biology as protocell models or as potential semi-synthetic ‘‘living’’ cells. Water-in-oil droplets uses for rapid and relatively low-cost DNA amplification by PCR reaction are described as well as for in vitro…
Towards bioarrays of cellular-like compartments for monitoring few molecular binding events
2016
The aim of this work is to artificially reproduce scalable cellular-like compartments on a chip, thus realizing specialized small volume systems to study the behaviour of interacting biomolecules by few binding events. In particular, we show an unprecedented solution-based protein-binding assay based on arrays of oil-confined water droplets containing protein targets, labelled ligands and other compounds.
The CdCl2 effects on synthetic DNAs encaged in the nanodomains of a cationic water-in-oil microemulsion
2011
The present work is dedicated to the study of the interactions of CdCl(2) with the synthetic polynucleotides polyAT and polyGC confined in the nanoscopic aqueous compartment of the water-in-oil microemulsion CTAB/pentanol/hexane/water, with the goal to mimic in vitro the situation met by the nucleic acids in vivo. In biological structures, in fact, very long strings of nucleic acids are segregated into very small compartments having a radius exceedingly smaller than the length of the encapsulated macromolecule. For comparison, the behaviour of polyGC was also studied in aqueous solutions of matched composition. The conformational and thermal stabilities of both polynucleotides enclosed in t…
Development of microfluidics for sorting of carbon nanotubes
2018
Sorting of carbon nanotubes by their chirality is the current bottleneck in the way to their broad employment based on their exceptional electronic and optical properties. Despite the extensive effort, there is no known method, which would result in really pure chirality ensembles. Previously reported sorting protocols result in enrichment rather than in sorting, alter electronic structure, and suffer from low yield. This is mostly due to the statistical approach, where the nanotubes with mixed chiralities are treated as a set. In this thesis, we propose a new sorting technique based on nanotube-by-nanotube compartmelization, characterization, and sorting in a continuously running droplet-b…