Microfluidic Isolation of Aptamers for Glycan Targets

This paper presents microfluidic isolation of glycan-targeting aptamers. Integrating multiple cycles of affinity selection and nucleic acid amplification in a single device, aptamers can be isolated rapidly from a randomized library of single-stranded oligonucleotides with a small amount of the target glycan and without any off-chip procedures. Experimental results are presented from microfluidic aptamer isolation for the ganglioside GM3, yielding high-affinity aptamers (with a 17.5 μM equilibrium dissociation constant) using less than 500 μg of GM3 within ~ 9 hours. These results demonstrate the potential of our approach to be used to generate aptamers as easily accessible affinity reagents for the emerging field of glycomics.