One-Step Photochemical Generation of Biofunctionalized Hydrogel Particles via Two Phase Flow.

Biofunctional hydrogel particles become increasingly popular in medical diagnostics, however, their generation is time consuming and typically requires several process steps. We report on a new method for the simple, fast, and reproducible one-step generation of monodisperse hydrogel particles equipped with biofunctional molecules such as proteins or DNA. Key to the approach is the simultaneous photo crosslinking of the polymer chains and covalent binding of proteins or DNA through a C,H insertion reaction inside aqueous plug compartments that are produced via microfluidics. The strong performance in biological binding assays of the functionalized particles is demonstrated.