Collaborative Project #3

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has established a Large Scale Collaborative Research Program (www.gluegrant.org) whose primary goal is to understand the biological basis for the different clinical outcomes following severe traumatic or burn injury. Central to this effort is collection of data from genome wide expression analyses from blood leukocytes collected from critically ill patients at several clinical centers across the country.

Recent reports have brought to the forefront the diversity in protocols available for microarray analysis. The current work focuses on the development of an automated microfluidic device to rapidly isolate leukocytes from peripheral blood for subsequent molecular analyses. This microfluidic isolation of leukocytes can be accomplished by selective depletion of erythrocytes using deionized water.