Simulation and Experimental Study of Electrowetting on Dielectric (EWOD) Device for a Droplet Based Polymerase Chain Reaction System

Abstract

-Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology has been widely used in molecular biology, forensic analysis, evolutionary and medical diagnostic. PCR requirement for point of care application is shorten reaction time and reduces PCR reagent. If the PCR chip can be done by droplet basis, then the analysis system which minimal amount of fluid will be possible. In this report, we describe the simulation and experimental study of a parallel-plate electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) based PCR device. The EWOD device is applied to control PCR reagent and sample for a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system. The EWOD-based PCR system consists of 3.4 mm wide, 15.1 mm long serpentine-shape microheater integrated underneath to maintain temperature at each stage and 370 μm deep microchannel. DNA was driven by moving droplet through each square electrode (dimension 1x1 mm 2 ) that maintains temperature at denaturation, annealing, and extension region. The fluid dynamics of the device have been modeled by Coventorware , a commercially available MEMS simulation software, to show temperature distribution on each electrode. In experiment, this work studied contact angle reduction of different droplet because this result can be studied possibility of transporting of PCR reagent for a droplet based PCR.

Multichannel oscillatory-flow multiplex PCR microfluidics for high-throughput and fast detection of foodborne bacterial pathogens

“…In addition, it needs to point out that the thermocouple-based temperature measurement proposed here is an indirect measurement of the solution temperature by taking the metal block temperature. To acquire the direct temperature information of the samples in a 0.5-mm diameter reaction tube without causing massive disruption on flow inside the tube, the numerical simulation approaches can be used, such as finite element analysis (FEA) (Bu et al 2003;Wang et al 2005;Hu et al 2006;Ugsornrat et al 2008). Also, the noninvasive infrared (IR) thermography-based technique can be utilized to noninvasively measure the temperatures for oscillatory-flow PCR (Cheng et al 2005;.…”

“…(2) The reactor' s heater and sensor elements. The heaters used for the oscillatoryflow PCR have changed from the metal/ceramic blocks with a certain heating cartridge (Chiou et al 2001(Chiou et al , 2002Auroux et al 2003a;Hardt et al 2004;Münchow et al 2005;Frey et al 2007;Sugumar et al 2010) to the Peltier heater (Chen et al 2007b;Paik et al 2007) and the film heaters integrated on the chips (for example indium tin oxide (ITO) (Cheng et al 2005), platinum (Bu et al 2003;Wang et al 2005;Polini et al 2010;Sciancalepore et al 2011), chromium/aurum (Ugsornrat et al 2008), and others (Baker et al 2003;Auroux et al 2003bAuroux et al , 2004aSista et al 2008)). And, the temperature sensor elements include the commercially available thermocouples (Chiou et al 2001(Chiou et al , 2002Auroux et al 2003a;Chen et al 2007b;Paik et al 2007), the thermistors (Sista et al 2008;Sugumar et al 2010), and the on-chip film sensors (Bu et al 2003;Wang et al 2005;Polini et al 2010;Sciancalepore et al 2011).…”

“…However, it is usually bulky and expensive, which adversely affects the development of an integrated and portable oscillatory-flow PCR device. To overcome some of these drawbacks, some micropumping components have been developed for the oscillatory-flow PCR chips, such as the piezoelectric peristaltic micropump (Bu et al 2003), the ferrofluidic magnetic micropump (Hardt et al 2004;Münchow et al 2005), the electrokinetic micropump (Hu et al 2006), the electrowetting micropump (Paik et al 2007;Ugsornrat et al 2008;Sista et al 2008), the pneumatic micropump with an external actuator (Frey et al 2007), and the droplet-based magnetic transportation (Ohashi et al 2007). (4) The detection sensitivity of the bidirectional flow reactor.…”

“…The microchannel of the oscillatory-flow PCR can be constructed in such substrates as silicon (Bu et al 2003;Wang et al 2005), glass (Sugumar et al 2010), quartz (Baker et al 2003), and various polymers (for example SU-8 (Auroux et al 2003b, 2004a, poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) (Hardt et al 2004;Münchow et al 2005;Cheng et al 2005), cycloolefin copolymer (COC) (Hardt et al 2004;Münchow et al 2005), polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) (Hu et al 2006;Frey et al 2007;Ugsornrat et al 2008), polycarbonate (PC) (Ohashi et al 2007), and dry film resist (DFR) ). To form a chip with sealed channels, these chips are required to bond with another cover plate.…”

Thermally stable and uniform DNA amplification with picosecond laser ablated graphene rapid thermal cycling device

“…The virus leaks into the renal tubular lumen, showing a viral titer of 10 5 to 10 7 copies/mL in urine (Hirsch et al, 2005;Gjoerup and Chang, 2010;Barraclough et al, 2011). Compared with the different thermal cycling technologies (such as thermoelectric, photonic, electromagnetic induction and microwave), the method utilizing Joule heating in rapid thermal cycling is easy to integrate with the PCR device (Neuzil et al, 2006;Dinca et al, 2009;Lien et al, 2009;Ugsornrat et al, 2010). However, this requires expensive, fixed equipment, unsuitable for field or POC applications.…”