Microfluidic serial dilution ladder.

Serial dilution is a fundamental procedure that is common to a large number of laboratory protocols. Automation of serial dilution is thus a valuable component for lab-on-a-chip systems. While a handful of different microfluidic strategies for serial dilution have been reported, approaches based on continuous flow mixing inherently consume larger amounts of sample volume and chip real estate. We employ valve-driven circulatory mixing to address these issues and also introduce a novel device structure to store each stage of the dilution process. The dilution strategy is based on sequentially mixing the rungs of a ladder structure. We demonstrate a 7-stage series of 1 : 1 dilutions with R(2) equal to 0.995 in an active device area of 1 cm(2).