With the increasing demand for fast, accurate, and reliable biological sensor systems, miniaturized systems have been aimed at droplet-based sensor systems and have been promising. A micro-electrode dot array (MEDA) biochip, which is one kind of the miniaturized systems for biochemical protocols such as dispensing, dilutions, mixing, and so on, has become widespread due to enabling dynamical control of the droplets in microfluidic manipulations. In MEDA biochips, the electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) technique stands out since it can actuate droplets with nano/picoliter volumes. Microelectrode cells on MEDA actuate multiple droplets simultaneously to route locations for the purpose of the biochemical operations. Taking advantage of the feature, droplets are often routed in parallel to achieve high-throughput outcomes. Regarding parallel manipulation of multiple droplets, however, the droplets are known to be initially placed at a distant position to avoid undesirable mixing. The droplets thus result in traveling a long way for a manipulation, and the required biochip size for routing is also enlarged. This paper proposes a routing method for droplets to reduce the biochip size on a MEDA biochip with the allowance of splitting during routing operations. We mathematically derive the routing problem, and the experiments demonstrate that our proposal can significantly reduce the biochip size by 70.8% on average, compared to the state-of-the-art method.
Digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) has attracted attention in the biochemical and medical industries. In particular, a microelectrode dot array (MEDA) biochip, which is composed of a two-dimensional microelectrode array, enables to realize fine-grained manipulation such as dilution, mixing, sensing, and so on in real-time. Unlike existing DMFB biochips, a MEDA architecture allows microelectrodes to control a certain volume of droplet in a fine-grained manner and can vary droplet volume and shape in such a way that it efficiently conducts synthesis and manipulation of droplets. There have been many works in order to improve the efficiency of synthesis of MEDA biochips; however, the synthesis, especially droplet routing, has never considered the shape-dependent velocity of droplets. In this paper, we propose the droplet routing techniques for MEDA biochips with shape-dependent velocity of droplets. The proposed techniques take the advantage of variant velocities of droplets dependent on the shapes and aim to reduce the overall routing time of a droplet from a source to a destination. Simulation results confirm that the proposed techniques can shorten the routing time by 80% compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.