KINEMATIC ASSEMBLY OF SOFT-POLYMER BIOFLUIDIC CIRCUITS

摘要

Micro-scale biofluidic networks are providing researchers with a powerful new tool to perform useful biological assays. These Biofluidic Application Specific Integrated Circuits (BioASICs) can be designed for medical diagnostics, high throughput drug discovery, cell culturing, proteomics, functional genomics, protein crystallization, or any number of other important quantitative biology and medical applications. Performing these tests using microfluidic technology not only makes them more portable when compared to their traditional counterparts, but also decreases testing time and cost. One widely used method of creating BioASICs uses a soft polymer (Poly-dimethylsiloxane, PDMS) to replicate a silicon master mold in a technique known as soft lithography. This method can be used to create polymer microchannels rapidly and inexpensively, but complete assembly of these BioASICs requires precision alignment and bonding of the PDMS to a glass substrate that has proteins or metal electrodes patterned on the surface. PDMS1 low modulus of elasticity makes it difficult to achieve this alignment by mechanical means, so the assembly must be performed manually under an optical microscope, leading to alignment errors that may be over an order of magnitude larger than feature dimensions in the BioASICs.