Manipulation of zebrafish's orientation using artificial cilia in a microchannel with actively adaptive wall design.

Karthick Mani,Bivas Panigrahi,Chia-Yuan Chen,Tsung-Chun Chang Chien

doi:10.1038/srep36385

Abstract

The zebrafish is a powerful genetic model organism especially in the biomedical chapter for new drug discovery and development. The genetic toolbox which this vertebrate possesses opens a new window to investigate the etiology of human diseases with a high degree genetic similarity. Still, the requirements of laborious and time-consuming of contemporary zebrafish processing assays limit the procedure in carrying out such genetic screen at high throughput. Here, a zebrafish control scheme was initiated which includes the design and validation of a microfluidic platform to significantly increase the throughput and performance of zebrafish larvae manipulation using the concept of artificial cilia actuation. A moving wall design was integrated into this microfluidic platform first time in literature to accommodate zebrafish inside the microchannel from 1 day post-fertilization (dpf) to 6 dpf and can be further extended to 9 dpf for axial orientation control in a rotational range between 0 to 25 degrees at the minimum step of 2-degree increment in a stepwise manner. This moving wall feature was performed through the deflection of shape memory alloy wire embedded inside the microchannel controlled by the electrical waveforms with high accuracy.

Highlights

Ports above the zebrafish are available to administer local drug treatments[7]
This animal model in its early embryonic stages achieves an average axial rotation of 20 degrees when a substantial rotational angle of artificial cilia of almost 60 degrees was achieved through the in-house magnetic coil system
The stepwise rotational movement of the early zebrafish can be controlled precisely through moderate tilting of artificial cilia. These findings are affirmed from the higher degree of linearity (R2 > 0.85) of the resultant curve fitting between the rotational motion of the zebrafish and artificial cilia tilting

Summary

Introduction

Ports above the zebrafish are available to administer local drug treatments[7]. A ZebraBeat device which integrated the imaging analysis function into a flexible platform is aimed to record cardiac activities of zebrafish in non-intrusive, low cost, and high reproducibility fashions[8]. To further extend the capability of microfluidic based platform in particular with a specific aim to improve the imaging quality and facilitate the time-lapse imaging, a new design is highly demanded from the perspective of orientation control of zebrafish during imaging Propelled by this motivation, an ideology was originated with an adaptive wall concept that can dynamically accommodate the dramatically morphological change of developing zebrafish inside a microchannel in an automated manner. An ideology was originated with an adaptive wall concept that can dynamically accommodate the dramatically morphological change of developing zebrafish inside a microchannel in an automated manner Combined this feature with the inclusion of our previously reported artificial actuation for axial orientation control[13], multiple anatomical viewing angles of zebrafish imaging over the entire early developing stages (from a fertilized egg to a larva) become feasible. In the Conclusion section, the utility of this work is summarized

Methods

Results

Conclusion