The zebrafish is a powerful genetic model organism especially in the biomedical chapter for new drug discovery and development. The genetic toolbox which this vertebrate possesses opens a new window to investigate the etiology of human diseases with a high degree genetic similarity. Still, the requirements of laborious and time-consuming of contemporary zebrafish processing assays limit the procedure in carrying out such genetic screen at high throughput. Here, a zebrafish control scheme was initiated which includes the design and validation of a microfluidic platform to significantly increase the throughput and performance of zebrafish larvae manipulation using the concept of artificial cilia actuation. A moving wall design was integrated into this microfluidic platform first time in literature to accommodate zebrafish inside the microchannel from 1 day post-fertilization (dpf) to 6 dpf and can be further extended to 9 dpf for axial orientation control in a rotational range between 0 to 25 degrees at the minimum step of 2-degree increment in a stepwise manner. This moving wall feature was performed through the deflection of shape memory alloy wire embedded inside the microchannel controlled by the electrical waveforms with high accuracy.
The zebrafish has emerged as an important vertebrate model for genetic screens and new drug development due to its significant characteristics such as optical transparency, rapid ex vivo growth, and high genetic similarity to humans. Despite these benefits, the scale of zebrafish studies is still limited as a result of the lack of a robust method to manipulate zebrafish during screening. In this work a new microfluidic channel layout in conjunction with a series of magnetically actuated artificial cilia were employed to provide orientation control of zebrafish larvae with axial rotation capability. This method enables 0-15 degrees of rotation inside the microchannel with high accuracy and less detrimental impact, as opposed to the conventional methods. In addition, the bioactivity of tested larvas remains stable with no significant difference to those in the control group during the timelapse imaging. The presented platform along with the provided analytical paradigm is forecasted to be beneficial to facilitate the zebrafish screening using microfluidics in pharmaceutical industry.
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