Abstract
There is an unmet demand for microfluidics in biomedicine. This paper describes contactless fabrication of microfluidic circuits on standard Petri dishes using just a dispensing needle, syringe pump, three‐way traverse, cell‐culture media, and an immiscible fluorocarbon (FC40). A submerged microjet of FC40 is projected through FC40 and media onto the bottom of a dish, where it washes media away to leave liquid fluorocarbon walls pinned to the substrate by interfacial forces. Such fluid walls can be built into almost any imaginable 2D circuit in minutes, which is exploited to clone cells in a way that beats the Poisson limit, subculture adherent cells, and feed arrays of cells continuously for a week. This general method should have wide application in biomedicine.
Highlights
There is an unmet demand for microfluidics in biomedicine
A dispensing needle filled with FC40, connected to a syringe pump, and held by a three-way traverse is lowered below the surface of the fluorocarbon; starting the pump jets FC40 on to the dish to push media aside
As FC40 has a low equilibrium contact angle (CA) on polystyrene (
Summary
Chambers accept a manyfold wider range of volume than spaced wells in a microplate, whilst containing ≈1000th the volume.[7] if chambers contain cells, the volume ratio of intra- to extracellular fluid more closely resembles that in vivo This method is contactless: the nozzle touches neither dish nor media. Fluid walls are sufficiently stable to be carried up/downstairs between labs, incubators, and microscopes—just like any dish filled with liquid (see Movie S2 in the Supporting Information). These examples illustrate the versatility of jetting and show that circuits with almost any imaginable 2D shape can be built quickly and accurately using cell-friendly materials
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