This work presents a disposable passive microfluidic system, allowing chemotaxis studies, through the generation of a concentration gradient. The device can handle liquid flows without an external supply of pressure or electric gradients, but simply using gravity force. It is able to ensure flow rates of 10 µL/h decreasing linearly with 2.5% in 24 h. The device is made of poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA), a biocompatible material, and it is fabricated by micro-milling and solvent assisted bonding. It is assembled into a mini incubator, designed properly for cell biology studies in passive microfluidic devices, which provides control of temperature and humidity levels, a contamination-free environment for cells with air and 5% of CO. Furthermore, the mini incubator can be mounted on standard inverted optical microscopes. By using our microfluidic device integrated into the mini incubator, we are able to evaluate and follow in real-time the migration of any cell line to a chemotactic agent. The device is validated by showing cell migration at a rate of 0.36 µm/min, comparable with the rates present in scientific literature.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi10080551 | DOI Listing |
Micromachines (Basel)
December 2024
Complex Fluids Laboratory, Advanced Materials and Systems Research Division, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Seoul 02792, Republic of Korea.
Microfluidic-chip based hydrodynamic filtration is one of the passive sorting techniques that can separate cell or particle suspensions into subpopulations of different sizes. As the branch channels and side channels play an important role in maintaining particle focusing, their rational design is necessary for highly efficient sorting. A model framework involving multiple side and multiple branch channels has been developed by extending the analytical analysis of three-dimensional laminar flow in channel networks, which was previously validated by comparison with numerical simulations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Sci (Weinh)
January 2025
School of Fashion and Textiles, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 999077, China.
Acting as the interface between the human body and its environment, clothing is indispensable in human thermoregulation and even survival under extreme environmental conditions. Development of clothing textiles with prolonged passive temperature-adaptive thermoregulation without external energy consumption is much needed for protection from thermal stress and energy saving, but very challenging. Here, a temperature-adaptive thermoregulation filament (TATF) consisting of thermoresponsive vacuum cavities formed by the temperature-responsive volume change of the material confined in the cellular cores of the filament is proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBulk methods to fractionate organelles lack the resolution to capture single-cell heterogeneity. While microfluidic approaches attempt to fractionate organelles at the cellular level, they fail to map each organelle back to its cell of origin-crucial for multiomics applications. To address this, we developed VacTrap, a high-throughput microfluidic device for isolating and spatially indexing single nuclei from mammalian cells.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLab Chip
January 2025
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, 95053, USA.
We present here a passive and label-free droplet microfluidic platform to sort cells stepwise by lactate and proton secretion from glycolysis. A technology developed in our lab, Sorting by Interfacial Tension (SIFT), sorts droplets containing single cells into two populations based on pH by using interfacial tension. Cellular glycolysis lowers the pH of droplets through proton secretion, enabling passive selection based on interfacial tension and hence single-cell glycolysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZygote
December 2024
Tissue Engineering Department, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.
This study explores the efficacy of a novel microfluidic device in isolating rheotactic sperm and assesses their advantages compared with other motile sperm. Two microfluidic devices were used in this study: the microfluidic device we designed to separate sperm based on rheotaxis and a simple passive microfluidic device. We compared the results with the density gradient centrifugation technique.
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