Sorting Colloidal Structures

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Summary: New methods for making custom-shaped colloidal particles offer unique opportunities for capturing and separating specific molecular, particulate, and cellular species in soft colloidal materials that contain a complex variety of components. An example of a soft colloidal material is human blood, which can contain a wide variety of proteins, complexes, and cells in an aqueous solution at a well-regulated pH. Among the current challenges in the fields of biomedicine and nanomedicine, it is important to develop methods of efficiently separating different components and cell types in human blood with a high degree of shape and size specificity. Diagnostic methods that rely on detecting very small numbers of abnormal cells in blood are also highly desirable. Separation of small numbers of abnormal cells in a viable state would be a major breakthrough. Researchers from the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at UCLA have developed a new method of separating and/or sorting specific target structures from other non-target structures in a complex mixture. These target structures and non-target structures are typically objects having maximum dimensions in the range of a few nanometers to hundreds of micrometers that are dispersed in a complex aqueous solution. This is achieved by using custom-designed shape-complementary colloidal particles to specifically separate target colloidal structures from non-target colloidal structures based on differences in attractive interactions.   Applications: Separating red blood cells from whole blood Organelle isolation from lysed cells Separation of macromolecules from complex solution Biomarker isolation and detection   Advantages: Custom-designed shape-complementary particles allow for greater target specificity Designs are specified to bind targets while not binding non-targets Custom-shaped particles can be mass produced using existing methods, including spatially patterned radiation and relief deposition templating. Custom-shaped particles can contain fluorescent dyes and, surface charge, and attached polymers for further more specific detection and separation.