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ABSTRACT
A shear flow breaks the spherical symmetry of a flexible polymer, which has some interesting consequences for the electrophoresis of polyelectrolytes. In addition to introducing a chain-length dependence of the electrophoretic velocity, there is also the possibility of migration of the molecule perpendicular to the direction of coaxial gradients in pressure and electric potential. This has been shown to produce a rapid and highly localised concentration of DNA within a microfluidic capillary, with a number of potential applications to on-chip preparation and analysis of genomic DNA. In this paper, dedicated to Prof. Daan Frenkel, I will describe a calculation of the electrophoretic motion of a long polyelectrolyte under a coaxial flow and electric field.
GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge helpful discussions with several colleagues: Jason Butler (University of Florida), Burkhard Dünweg (Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research) and Ravi Prakesh (Monash University).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.