An electro-conductive plane heating element for rapid thermal lysis of bacterial cells

Abstract

In the process of developing a point-of-care testing device, we fabricated a plane heating element using carbon paste capable of thermal lysis. The plane heating element can generate heat of 150 degrees C within 60 s at 0.4 A power supply within 8 W. The developed plane heating element was very effective in the extraction of DNA from both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria which was further confirmed by agarose gel electrophoresis. In this approach, we aimed to eliminate expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive procedures for the lysis of bacterial cells to extract nucleic acids to detect pathogenic bacteria accurately and swiftly.