Welcome

Welcome to M.D.-ERL

Our group is interested in the development of medical diagnostic microdevices with a primary focus on human blood electrokinetics. Our goals are to develop portable, point of care tools that can provide rapid, quantitative results for disease diagnosis and monitoring. Our hope is that treatment methods can become more streamlined and better tailored to the patient with the additional, easy to obtain information from microdevices. Currently, the medical diagnosis of blood disorders rely on expensive and time-consuming procedures that are outsourced to special analytical laboratories. Our lab is studying emerging electrokinetic microdevice technology, which has the potential to replace off-line lab analysis with point-of-care devices that could provide the patient with positive or negative results, along with quantitative information on disease progression, in less than 5 minutes. Outgrowths of the new technology might include portable diagnostic devices for acute diseases or monitoring of chronic diseases, both of which could be conveniently used in remote geographical areas, where traditional diagnostic laboratories are inaccessible.

The term microdevices refers to a small (less than 3 inches in diameter) apparatus within which micro-sized chambers (0.001 mm to 0.1 mm in width and depth) have been constructed. Development of these devices is at a stage where external forces (pressure driven flow or applied electrical fields) are required to move liquids through the microchannels. M.D.-ERL research focuses on electrokinetic tools including linear and non-linear electrophoresis for transport and separations of red blood cell systems. One type of electrokinetic tool is dielectrophoresis - the application of non-uniform alternating current (AC) electric fields to suspensions of polarizable particles or cells. Due to the polarizability of cells, each species is susceptible to certain AC frequencies that are known as the cell’s resonant frequency. Genetically or geometrically similar cells have more similar, but still distinct, resonant frequencies. Our group has found that dielectrophoresis (DEP) is capable of distinguishing between blood types which differ only by expression of polysaccharide molecules on the membrane surface. We hope to be able to extend this technology to one day be able to quantify abnormal versus normal blood cells.

The information on this website is tailored for students who are interested in becoming involved in this research as well as colleagues in this field who may wish to know more about what M.D.-ERL does. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Applications for graduate school are available via: http://www.msstate.edu/dept/grad/

Adrienne R. Minerick