Abstract
Existing digital microfluidic (DMF) chips exploit the electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) force to perform droplet splitting. However, the current splitting methods are not flexible and the volume of the droplets suffers from a large variation. Herein, we propose a DMF chip featuring a 3D microblade structure to enhance the droplet-splitting performance. By exploiting the EWOD force for shaping and manipulating the mother droplet, we obtain an average dividing error of <2% in the volume of the daughter droplets for a number of fluids such as deionized water, DNA solutions and DNA-protein mixtures. Customized droplet splitting ratios of up to 20 : 80 are achieved by positioning the blade at the appropriate position. Additionally, by fabricating multiple 3D microblades on one electrode, two to five uniform daughter droplets can be generated simultaneously. Finally, by taking synthetic DNA targets and their corresponding molecular beacon probes as a model system, multiple potential pathogens that cause sepsis are detected rapidly on the 3D-blade-equipped DMF chip, rendering it as a promising tool for parallel diagnosis of diseases.
Highlights
Parallelization and miniaturization are the clear goals of molecular diagnostics for disease detection from a minute amount of an available sample.[1,2] To achieve these goals, a wide variety of materials and technologies have been investigated
We introduce a novel approach for accurate droplet splitting by constructing 3D microstructures, designated as blades, on digital microfluidic (DMF) chips (Fig. 1)
To test the performance of our microblade structure for droplet splitting, we compared the uniformity of the daughter droplets with those split by the widely accepted three consecutive electrodes splitting method (Fig. 3a) under the same coating and actuation conditions using DI water with a conductivity
Summary
Parallelization and miniaturization are the clear goals of molecular diagnostics for disease detection from a minute amount of an available sample.[1,2] To achieve these goals, a wide variety of materials and technologies have been investigated. Microfluidic systems have attracted the most attention because they only consume a few microliters of the sample and reagents, have fast reaction times, and are precise and portable.[3] Most investigations have utilized channel-based flow microfluidic systems.[4] channel-based microfluidic systems have inherent limitations that require redundant supporting equipment such as pumps and valves for the operation of the systems, which hinders their widespread application in POC diagnostics. DMF systems have been successfully employed in a variety of biological and chemical assays, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR),[15,16,17] DNA probe hybridization,[18] proteomics,[19,20] immunoassays,[21,22,23] cell-based assays,[24,25,26,27] and other chemical applications.[28,29] their small footprint is well suited for POC devices and has resulted in an increasing number of applications
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