Chathurika Rathnayaka Presents Poster at PITTCON Conference & Expo 2021 Virtual Event

Chathurika Rathnayaka, a Graduate Student in the Soper research group at the University of Kansas, presented a poster titled, “Electrokinetics of Ribonucleotide Monophosphates (rNMPs) in Thermoplastic Nanochannels,” at the 2021 PITTCON Virtual Event. Chathurika’s poster presentation was during the Monday, March 8, 2021 session number PACS-11 from 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM (EST). Other authors on the poster include Charuni A. Amarasekara, Uditha S. Athapattu, Lulu Zhang, Junseo Choi, Sunggook Park, Aaron C. Nagel, and Steven A. Soper.

Electrokinetic separation of biomolecules in nanochannels (<100 nm width and depth) is becoming interesting due to unique nanoscale phenomena such as electric double layer overlap, high surface area to volume ratio and concentration polarization. In this study, the electrophoretic properties of the rNMPs were investigated in different nanochannel materials. Here, we thermally fusion bonded Cyclic Olefin Copolymer (COC) nanochannel device (100 nm x 100 nm, width x depth, and 100 μm in length) with a cover plate made from COC and the change in the electroosmotic flow was investigated by varying UV/O3 dosing time, which changed the amount of surface charge, after device assembly. Nano-electrophoresis of the rNMPs labeled with ATTO-532 dye reporter were tracked using an epifluorescence microscope. Microelectrophoresis of ATTO-532 tagged rNMPs were investigated, but could not achieve baseline resolution for rCMP and rAMP. Nanoscale electrophoresis of the dye-labeled rNMPs were explored in both poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and COC nanochannel devices and higher resolution (>1.5) was achieved with the COC nanochannel device for all four rNMPs. The results acquired for COC nanoscale electrophoresis indicated high identification accuracy (>99%) of the rNMPs. Furthermore, we were able to separate the methylated rNMPs from their non-methylated counterparts, which will give an insight for identifying epitranscriptomal modifications using our SMS strategy.