Surface modification of microfluidic chip microreactors for real-time pcr

The paper is devoted to optimization of a microfluidic analytical system (MFAS) designed to perform polymerase chain reaction (Real-Time PCR) in a glass-silicon microchip comprising 16 microreactors 1.3 μl each. We have evaluated various methods of surface modification and proved that polymethylmethoxysiloxane-based polymeric coating (PMMS) is the best one to prevent PCR inhibition. Using the proposed modification technique, we succeeded in obtaining large water wetting angles on silicon surface and also in reducing considerably the time of preparing the microchip for the analysis. The estimates obtained show that the multi-reactor PCR MFAS provides DNA detection by the Real-Time PCR method with the efficiency equal to the theoretically possible level.