An Adaptive Low Cost Single Target Sample Preparation on Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Sample preparation on Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) is an indispensable process for accomplishing biochemical reactions. Original reactants are usually diluted to the solutions with desirable concentrations. Framing various droplets with desired target concentrations on such a chip in an automated manner is the real challenge to sort out. In this work, we propose an Adaptive Sample Preparation Algorithm (ASPA) for DMFB. It can produce any sample droplets within the range of (0-1024) concentration factors (CF’s) in an adaptive manner. The proposed method also ensures an error-free, cost-effective sample preparation for Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB). Our method significantly reduces the number of sample droplets to prepare any single target concentration on a DMFB platform while the number of mixing-splitting steps remains the same for most of the cases compared to earlier methods. The requirement of buffer droplets and waste may be slightly more for a few cases in this method. However, as the buffer cost is negligible compared to fluid samples, the overall sample preparation cost decreases by our method.