| Summary: | Biomedical diagnostic and analysis are typically performed in large-scale central laboratories where lot of bulky equipment and reagents are needed. Microfluidics is a rapid developing technology and has many applications. Microfluidics chip is a tiny platform and one of its suitable application is in biomedical diagnostics and analysis. It can help to miniaturize the sample preparation and analysis into simplified operation on a small microfluidic chip in a portable desktop system. One of this application is cell lysis which breaks the cell membrane walls before the DNA molecules or other organic analytes such as proteins etc in organic samples can be extracted for further analysis or diagnostics. In this project, a cell lysis station is designed to integrate the optical energy from LED light source and mechanical grinding force induced by spinning magnetic field on the in-situ rotating magnetic beads in order to break the cell membrane walls of organic samples inside the microfluidic chip to release the target DNA molecules or other proteins for subsequent analysis and diagnostic. This portable cell lysis station was simulated and designed using a computer aided design (CAD) software SolidWork
and was constructed using 3D printing rapid prototyping tool. The novel design of this cell lysis station is the inter-changeable stationary magnetic field or rapid rotating magnetic field together with the optical energy for cell lysis. This ability helps to broaden the cell lysis capability on different variety of cells. The use of microfluidic chip for sample handling allows it to be integrated with other portable microfluidic diagnostic and analysis system Besides, as a, this customer driven design is compact and portable with overall sze of 200 mm x 150 mm x 150 mm, using portable battery bank and no external wired electrical connection is needed during operation. This gives the users a lot of benefits and they can easily carry this cell lysis station to anywhere for the experiments.
|
|---|