Device Monitors Micro Activity

Using an array of high-performance lenses integrated on a chip containing microfluids, researchers at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a way to accurately detect microscopic activity.

The development, published on Jan. 18 in the British journal Lab on a Chip, allows scientists to better monitor experiments with microfluidics, which involves manipulating miniscule amounts of liquids to scale down lab processes to a micro-sized package.

Unlike methods used in the past, this development holds potential for more reliable results, said SEAS Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Kenneth B. Crozier, who directed the research.

“One usually has to use an expensive and bulky microscope [to observe] a limited region of the chip,” Crozier said. “[Our optical detection system] gives us effectively more than 60 microscopes on [one] chip.”

Crozier added that the new system is scalable and reusable.

The team’s device, which can analyze nearly 200,000 droplets per second, works like a stop-motion camera, capturing images of the drops as they travel down multiple channels of the microfluidic system.

SEAS Physics Professor David A. Weitz, who co-authored the article, said that microfluidics offers a much more efficient alternative to traditional lab methods.

“Think of the [significance] of the single transistor 30 or 40 years ago,” Weitz said. “Now they make millions of transistors all together. And [microfluidics] is similarly going to let us do many, many things in parallel. Experiments can literally go a million times faster.”

The new technology may eventually be incorporated into GnuBio, a start-up company that the researchers hope to spin off from their work in microfluidics.

Weitz said the new technology could cut down costs of running lab experiments as well as speed up lab processes from several months to a few hours.

“We could do something that right now costs maybe $300,000 and do it for 30,” Weitz said. “It’s what’s so exciting about microfluidics.”

“We haven’t done it yet, but it is our dream,” he added.