Abstract

Microfluidic Printing: From Combinatorial Drug Screening to Artificial Cell Assaying

Tingrui Pan, Associate Professor, University Of California Davis

Microfluidic impact printing has been recently introduced, benefiting from the nature of simple device architecture, low cost, non-contamination, scalable multiplexability and high throughput.  In this talk, we will review this novel microfluidic-based droplet generation platform, utilizing modular microfluidic cartridges and expandable combinatorial printing capacity controlled by plug-and-play multiplexed actuators.  Such a customizable microfluidic printing system allows for ultrafine control of the droplet volume from picoliters (~10pL) to nanoliters (~100nL), a 10,000 fold variation. The high flexibility of droplet manipulations can be simply achieved by controlling the magnitude of actuation (e.g., driving voltage) and the waveform shape of actuation pulses, in addition to nozzle size restrictions. Detailed printing characterizations on these parameters have been conducted consecutively. A multichannel impact printing system has been prototyped and demonstrated to provide the functions of single-droplet jetting and droplet multiplexing as well as concentration gradient generation. Moreover, several enabling chemical and biological assays have been implemented and validated on this highly automated and flexible printing platform.  In brief, the microfluidic impact printing system could be of potential value to establishing multiplexed droplet assays for high-throughput life science researchers.