Journal Article

On-board control of wax valve on active centrifugal microfluidic chip and its application for plasmid DNA extraction

Li, Zhongwen, Ji, Wenbin, Wang, Yihui, Liu, Kangkang, Wang, Guanghui, Ho-pui, Ho, Yang, Jiachen, Xinghai Ning, Tan, Jie, Huang, Xinyu

2019

Overview

For the realization of bioassay with complex fluidic manipulation and logic operation on lab-on-a-disc platform, we present an active integrated centrifugal microfluidic chip based on the on-board control of wax valves within a multilayer complex chip. The multilayer hybrid structure including a microfluidic layer and a printing circuit board (PCB) layer utilizes the digital logic of electronic system to control the logic of liquid flow in microfluidic layer. The coupling mechanism between both layers is based on heat transfer, namely, the heating resistors in PCB layer are used to melt and open the paraffin wax valves in microfluidic layer. Without the limitation of surface tension-dependent valves, the application of active valve could be freely designed, which can largely extend the ability of integration on microfluidic chip. Many complex functional units including liquid sequential loading and switching of liquid flow are demonstrated. As an application, we also present a multilayer complex chip for plasmid DNA extraction based on our platform. In a word, our active centrifugal microfluidic platform provides a solution for the integration of complex bioassay on rotating disc, which has great potential in the applications of point-of-care diagnostics (POC).

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Bio-assays / Bioassays / Circuit boards / Control / Deoxyribonucleic acid / DNA / Fluid dynamics / Heat transfer / Heating / Hybrid structures / Integration / Liquid flow / Logic / Microfluidics / Multilayers / Paraffin / Paraffin wax / PCB / Plasmids / Polychlorinated biphenyls / Printed circuits / Resistors / Rotating disks / Surface tension / Valves / Waxes