The engineering of microbial systems increasingly strives to achieve a co-existence and co-functioning of different populations. By creating interactions, one can utilize combinations of cells where each population has a specialized function, such as regulation or sharing of metabolic burden. Here we describe a microfluidic system that enables long-term and independent growth of fixed and distinctly separate microbial populations, while allowing communication through a thin nano-cellulose filter. Using quorum-sensing signaling, we can couple the populations and show that this leads to a rapid and stable connection over long periods of time. We continue to show that this control over communication can be utilized to drive nonlinear responses. The coupling of separate populations, standardized interaction, and context-independent function lay the foundation for the construction of increasingly complex community-wide dynamic genetic regulatory mechanisms.
Point‐of‐care devices that are inexpensive, disposable, and environmentally friendly are becoming increasingly predominant in the field of biosensing and biodiagnostics. Here, microfluidics is a suitable option to endow portability and minimal reagent and material consumption. Nanocellulose is introduced to manufacture microfluidic channels and as a storage and immobilization compartment of glucose oxidase. Improved enzymatic activity retention is demonstrated in a simple and disposable point‐of‐care diagnostic unit that is able to detect glucose from fluid matrices at 0.1 × 10
−3
m
concentration and in less than 10 min. It is concluded that the patterning and fluidic technologies that are possible with nanocellulose enable easily scalable multianalyte designs.
We present a simple and facile method for long-term preservation of hydrophilicity of oxygen plasma-hydrophilized poly (dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) by cold storage. We show that storage under temperature of − 80 °C can maintain superhydrophilicity of plasma-exposed PDMS for at least 100 days. Storage at − 15 °C and at 22 °C room temperature (RT) is shown to exhibit, respectively, about half and full recovery of the original hydrophobicity after 100 days in storage. Furthermore, we investigated the implications of the cold storage for microfluidic applications, the capillary filling rate and the ability of the flow to bypass geometrical obstacles in a microfluidic channel. It is shown that the preservation of capillary filling properties of microchannels is in close agreement with the contact angle (CA) measurements and that the colder the storage temperature, the better the capillary filling capability of the channels is preserved. We ascribe the significantly reduced recovery rate to reduced thermally activated relaxation phenomena such as diminished diffusion of low molecular weight species (LMW) in the polymer matrix at colder temperatures. This is supported by ATR-FTIR measurements of the OH vibration band over time for samples stored at different temperatures.
We introduce a non-lithographical and vacuum-free method to pattern silicon. The method combines inkjet printing and metal assisted chemical etching (MaCE); we call this method “INKMAC”. A commercial silver ink is printed on top of a silicon surface to create the catalytic patterns for MaCE. The MaCE process leaves behind a set of silicon nanowires in the shape of the inkjet printed micrometer scale pattern. We further show how a potassium hydroxide (KOH) wet etching process can be used to rapidly etch away the nanowires, producing fully opened cavities and channels in the shape of the original printed pattern. We show how the printed lines (width 50–100 µm) can be etched into functional silicon microfluidic channels with different depths (10–40 µm) with aspect ratios close to one. We also used individual droplets (minimum diameter 30 µm) to produce cavities with a depth of 60 µm and an aspect ratio of two. Further, we discuss using the structured silicon substrate as a template for polymer replication to produce superhydrophobic surfaces.
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