Microfluidic Based Fast and Dynamic Droplet Interface Bilayer System (DIBS)

Zain Hayat

doi:10.26717/bjstr.2019.21.003554

Abstract

Artificial Bio-mimetic membranes are perfect tool to examine and display response of molecular transport across mediums of certain concentration...

Highlights

Microfluidics [1,2,3,4] as an emerging technology of fluid manipulation provides control, flexibility as well as size scaling of large experimental techniques down to handheld Lab-onchip systems
This work comprises the design of a microfluidic lab-on-chip system for fast and programmable artificial bio-mimetic membranes designed by droplet interface bilayer mechanism
Many types of lab on chip systems are realized since the advent of the technology, in particular the pioneering work of Stephan Quake [2,3] for multiphase flows in microfluidic channels led to the development of state of the art technology called, Droplet microfluidics or Digital/Discrete microfluidics [57]

Summary

Introduction

Microfluidics [1,2,3,4] as an emerging technology of fluid manipulation provides control, flexibility as well as size scaling of large experimental techniques down to handheld Lab-onchip systems. Many types of geometries are in use for high throughput production of assays at kHz rates, namely T-junction, co-flow, flow focusing, step emulsification and capillary microfluidics [8,9,10] These very systems revolutionized the mixing and controlled encapsulation as well as paved the way for industrial scale ultra-high-throughput generation of mono disperesed emulsification for applications like RNA and DNA sequencing [11,12], synthesis of nanoparticles and quantum dots [13,14], hydrogel-encapsulated droplet bilayers [14], synthesis of soft micro-capsules [15] and hydrogel particles [16], 3D droplet bilayers [17], digital PCR [18,19,20], transport analysis [21,22] and recently organ in droplet [23]. The device constructed had three layers, two layers of PDMS (top and bottom) and a middle layer with on-demand membrane pores with selectable size. (Figure 1a & 1b) present the general idea of a flow focusing geometry for production of mono disperesd microdroplets of size 100μm at generation rate of 2KHz (droplet frequency determined by [8,10]) in square microchannels

Methods

Results

Conclusion