Microfluidic Cellular and Molecular Detection for Lab-on-a-Chip Applications

The power of the "Lab on a Chip" concept lies primarily in its ability to detect and manipulate at the cellular and molecular level with sufficiently high throughputs. With careful design and scaling considerations, molecular and cellular detectors (or sensors) facilitated by controlled microfluidic separation, purification, sorting, and mixing operations are more sensitive and specific. In this presentation, I will depict three levels of detection: DNA, protein, and cell. For DNA detection, a droplet microfluidic platform enables rapid and homogenous mixing in confined picoliter volumes for molecular hybridization fluorescence images. For proteins, I will discuss how an acoustic cavity mixer enabled an order of magnitude increase in speed of detection. Finally, a novel microfluidic device based on dielectrophoresis (DEP) enables the detection and sorting of biological cells based on their dielectric properties.