Abstract
In recent years, printed circuit board (PCB)-based microfluidics have been explored as a means to achieve standardization, seamless integration, and large-scale manufacturing of microfluidics, thus paving the way for widespread commercialization of developed prototypes. In this work, static micro polymerase chain reaction (microPCR) devices comprising resistive microheaters integrated on PCBs are introduced as miniaturized thermocyclers for efficient DNA amplification. Their performance is compared to that of conventional thermocyclers, in terms of amplification efficiency, power consumption and duration. Exhibiting similar efficiency to conventional thermocyclers, PCB-based miniaturized thermocycling achieves faster DNA amplification, with significantly smaller power consumption. Simulations guide the design of such devices and propose means for further improvement of their performance.
Highlights
The interest of both academia and industry in microfluidic devices has been continuously growing for the last three decades, thanks to their advantages, including the capability of handling very small quantities of expensive reagents and scarce samples, the performance of high resolution, precise and sensitive detection, and the reduction in analysis time, cost, and footprint [1]
The entire microPCR device consisted of a chip comprising microfluidic chambers and a resistive microheater, all integrated on printed circuit board (PCB), and a temperature controller for thermocycling of the chip and sample
For the validation of the static microPCR, an optimized 2T protocol was developed for efficient and fast DNA amplification based on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
Summary
The interest of both academia and industry in microfluidic devices has been continuously growing for the last three decades, thanks to their advantages, including the capability of handling very small quantities of expensive reagents and scarce samples, the performance of high resolution, precise and sensitive detection, and the reduction in analysis time, cost, and footprint [1]. As already demonstrated in several works, the Lab-on-PCB approach enables seamless integration of microfluidics, sensors, and electronics [7,8,9,10,11,12] and promises commercial upscalability, low cost, and standardization of microfluidics Owing to these characteristics, Lab-on-PCB devices can be upscaled, provided more processes and prototypes adapted to the PCB industry are proposed. The entire microPCR device consisted of a chip comprising microfluidic chambers and a resistive microheater, all integrated on PCB, and a temperature controller for thermocycling of the chip and sample. The numerical calculations required for the study were performed by the finite element method implemented with the commercial code COMSOL (COMSOL Inc., Stockholm, Sweden)
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