Lab on a Chip Blog

Debashis Dutta, University of Wyoming, and J. Michael Ramsey, University of North Carolina, have developed a microfluidic device with a miniaturized hydraulic pump capable of performing pressure-driven separations.

The microfluidics-based liquid chromatographic system can also inject samples and has a response time in the order of 100 ms, offering a significant advantage over those with external pumps and correspondingly large dead volumes and equilibration times.

As with all our hot articles, this one’s free to access for 4 weeks – why not take a look:

A microfluidic device for performing pressure-driven separations
Debashis Dutta and J. Michael Ramsey
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20329K

A cheap PDMS biochip has been developed by Roland Thuenauer and Alois Sonnleitner, Center for Advanced Bioanalysis, Austria, that enables the recording of individual vesicle fusion events at the apical membrane of live cells.

The cells can be grown to polarize directly on the device and then correctly placed by an integrated micro-positioning system in order to perform apical TIRF microscopy, without the need for an additional weight to force the apical membrane of the cells into the region of the evanescent wave.

As with all our hot articles, this one’s free to access for 4 weeks – why not take a look:

A PDMS-based biochip with integrated sub-micrometre position control for TIRF microscopy of the apical cell membrane
Roland Thuenauer, Kata Juhasz, Reinhard Mayr, Thomas Frühwirth, Anna-Maria Lipp, Zsolt Balogi and Alois Sonnleitner
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20458K

A microfluidic chip that can mimic the functions of a centrifuge without moving parts or external forces has been designed by Dino Di Carlo and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles.  The Centrifuge-on-a-Chip uses fluid vortices to trap cells, and has been demonstrated to be effective in enriching rare cells from heterogeneous solutions and for performing labelling assays on-chip.

Automated cellular sample preparation using a Centrifuge-on-a-Chip
Albert J. Mach, Jae Hyun Kim, Armin Arshi, Soojung Claire Hur and Dino Di Carlo
Lab Chip, 2011, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20330D

Shuichi Takayama and collaborators at the University of Michigan have provided a brief overview of current challenges associated with integrated microfluidic circuits – covering parallel, serial and embedded instruction devices as well as device architecture, and providing an outlook for the next generation of ICMs.

Next-generation integrated microfluidic circuits
Bobak Mosadegh, Tommaso Bersano-Begey, Joong Yull Park, Mark A. Burns and Shuichi Takayama
Lab Chip, 2011, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20387H

Both HOT articles are free to access for 4 weeks, so why not take a look today?

A disposable, water-activated, self-heating, easy-to-use, device for nucleic acid amplification and fluorescent detection has been developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

The device, which is the work of Haim H. Bau and colleagues, is self-contained, does not require any special instruments to operate and integrates chemical, water-triggered, exothermic heating with temperature regulation using a phase-change material (PCM) and isothermal nucleic acid amplification. The water flows into the exothermic reactor by wicking through a porous paper.

The device was shown to amplify and detect E. coli DNA and could detect as few as 10 target molecules in a sample. Future applications of this technology could include pathogen detection in blood, saliva, urine, food and water, and in settings far removed from the laboratory.

To find out more read the full article here

A self-heating cartridge for molecular diagnostics Changchun Liu, Michael G. Mauk, Robert Hart, Xianbo Qiu and Haim H. Bau

Lab Chip, 2011, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20345B