Amplification of Escherichia coli in a Continuous-Flow-PCR Microfluidic Chip and Its Detection with a Capillary Electrophoresis System

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a traditional method employed for the amplification of a target gene that has played an important role in biomolecular diagnostics. However, traditional PCR is very time-consuming because of the low-temperature variation efficiency. This work proposes a continuous-flow-PCR (CF-PCR) system based on a microfluidic chip. The amplification time can be greatly reduced by running the PCR solution into a microchannel placed on heaters set at different temperatures. Moreover, as capillary electrophoresis (CE) is an ideal way to differentiate positive and false-positive PCR products, a CE system was built to achieve efficient separation of the DNA fragments. This paper describes the process of amplification of Escherichia coli (E. coli) by the CF-PCR system built in-house and the detection of the PCR products by CE. The results demonstrate that the target gene of E. coli was successfully amplified within 10 min, indicating that these two systems can be used for the rapid amplification and detection of nucleic acids.