Synthesis of magnetic Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles and its application in DNA extraction

Abstract

The rapid nucleic acid extraction is essential, particularly the communicable diseases pandemic. In this work, aluminum modified Fe₃O₄ (Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺) particles were successfully synthesized by solvthermal method, epoxidation, covalent binding of iminodiacetic acid and Al³⁺ ions coordination for DNA extraction. Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles could greatly improve the efficiency of DNA extraction and the extraction could be totally completed within 15 minutes at the optimum condition. The simple and rapid method is mainly based on the Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles, which have large specific surface area, superparamagnetism, and Al³⁺ ions affinity to DNA. Additionally, several characterizations were carried out to further investigate the features of Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles. According to SEM image, the average dimension of monodispersed Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ spheres was around 200 nm. XPS results showed the existence of Al³⁺ on the surface of Fe₃O₄ particles, which further demonstrated the success of metal chelation in this material synthesis. The XRD patterns indicated that the Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles were the inverse spinel structure as the bare Fe₃O₄ particles. Good magnetism of Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles determined by VSM indicated that this material could be easily separated from the reaction system. To summarize, Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles is expected to play an important role in future DNA extraction due to remarkable performance.

Highlights

• The DNA separation media Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles were successfully synthesized.

• DNA adsorption was effectively achieved by Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles based on metal chelation.

• DNA extraction was significantly boosted by Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles.

Keywords:

• Magnetic separation
• Fe₃O₄@Al³⁺ particles
• monodisperse
• DNA extraction
• metal chelation

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Wenya Wang, College of Life Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology for providing the plasmid pUG-PT7-EGFP-TT7.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Industry-University-Research Collaborative Innovation and Scientific and Technical Cooperation project of Xiamen Municipal Bureau of Science and Technology [3502Z20172020].