Polymer and mechanical-stretching effects on lateral flow membrane

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Date
2013-07-01
Authors
Mohamad Faizal Khamis
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The function of membrane in immobilization and transport rate of analyte is greatly influenced by its physical morphology and chemical composition. These two factors play a vital role in order to get fast and accurate result, and these elements could be improve by exploring surface and internal layer of membrane. The improvement can be done by manipulating the membrane casting formulation such as polymer concentration and polymer viscosity. Besides, the membrane pore structure could be change by thermal-mechanical stretching. The result showed that the at lower polymer concentration of 5 wt%, the lateral wicking time was decreased but in expense of lower protein binding. In term of polymer viscosity, lower viscosity of 25-50 kcP resulted in too dilute solution (unable to form a piece of polymeric membrane) while high viscosity of 800-1000 kcP resulted in high protein binding but in sacrifice of slow lateral flow time compared to the medium polymer viscosity of 50-100 kcP. Meanwhile, uniaxial horizontal membrane stretching provides the faster wicking time compared to other configurations but as in concentration and viscosity studies, this lead to the low protein binding. However, the stretched membrane was still been recommended, since the wicking time improved from 404 s to 281 s for the water to migrate 2 cm height in the membrane strip at expense only showed slight dropping of the protein binding from 5107 μg cm-3 to 5017 μg cm-3. This study can give us the inside looks on the membrane manipulation process to provide better performance of membrane. At this point, more deep research needs to be done to improve membrane protein binding since its performance always not proportional to the lateral wicking time.
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