AIchE annual meeting at Salt Lake City

I am writing this post from Baymont inn and suits Salt Lake City, Utah. Our whole research group is in this town for 10th AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual national meeting). We are microfluidics people in a whole bunch of chemical engineers. I listened some of the talks today. There was one session for electrophoresis where some of the talks were about microfluidics. Tomorrow my advisor is going to chair a session closely related to our field. Probable I will be listening some more talks.

My labmate gave a presentation today. He talked about seperating proteins on microfluidics using electrophoresis. To generate electrophoretic velocity he uses internal electrodes in the glass channel-in glass chip. But electroosmotic flow was a big burden for his experiments. So he used some organic coating to suppress the electroosmotic velocity and was able to suppress it by an order of 5. He analyzed the protein mixture by mass spectroscopy. The microchip was connected to the mass spectrometry. That part was interesting.