A disposable, roll-to-roll hot-embossed inertial microfluidic device for size-based sorting of microbeads and cells

Lab Chip. 2016 May 21;16(10):1821-30. doi: 10.1039/c6lc00215c. Epub 2016 Apr 6.

Abstract

Inertial microfluidics has been a highly active area of research in recent years for high-throughput focusing and sorting of synthetic and biological microparticles. However, existing inertial microfluidic devices always rely on microchannels with high-aspect-ratio geometries (channel width w < channel height h) and small cross-sections (w×h < 50 × 100 μm(2)). Such deep and small structures increase fabrication difficulty and can limit manufacturing by large-scale and high-throughput production approaches such as roll-to-roll (R2R) hot embossing. In this work, we present a novel inertial microfluidic device using only a simple and low-aspect-ratio (LAR) straight microchannel (w > h) to achieve size-based sorting of microparticles and cells. The simple LAR geometry of the device enables successful high-throughput fabrication using R2R hot embossing. With optimized flow conditions and channel dimensions, we demonstrate continuous sorting of a mixture of 15 μm and 10 μm diameter microbeads with >97% sorting efficiency using the low-cost and disposable R2R chip. We further demonstrate size-based sorting of bovine white blood cells, demonstrating the ability to process real cellular samples in our R2R chip. We envision that this R2R hot-embossed inertial microfluidic chip will serve as a powerful yet low-cost and disposable tool for size-based sorting of synthetic microparticles in industrial applications or cellular samples in cell biology research and clinical diagnostics.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cattle
  • Cell Separation / instrumentation
  • Cell Separation / methods*
  • Lab-On-A-Chip Devices*
  • Leukocytes
  • Microfluidics / instrumentation*
  • Microfluidics / methods
  • Microspheres
  • Polymethyl Methacrylate / chemistry

Substances

  • Polymethyl Methacrylate