An automated microfluidic platform for parallel monitoring operations

Abstract

Microfluidics refers to devices or platforms consisting of micro-scale flow regions for fluid handling operations. As microfluidics has been applied extensively in many cell and biochemical applications, monitoring the related processes is an important requirement. In this work, we design and fabricate a high-throughput microfluidic device which contains 32 microchambers to potentially perform automated parallel cell culture and monitoring on an automated stage of a microscope. Automated fluid handling operations are achieved by integration of microfluidic components including valves, pumps and multiplexors. The cell culture chambers operate in parallel in a single biochip such that multiple experiments are conducted simultaneously. However, the chamber positions may deviate at different time points throughout operations as the motorized microscopic stage vibrates and moves back and forth for monitoring multiple chambers, therefore realignment of the culture regions at different time points can be extremely tedious. Here, we report an image-based position strategy to re-align the chamber position before every recording of microscopic image. We fabricate alignment marks at defined locations next to the culture chambers in the microfluidic device as reference positions. We also develop image processing algorithms to recognize the chamber positions in real-time, followed by re-aligning the chambers to their pre-set positions in the captured images. We perform experiments to validate and characterize the device functionality and the automated re-alignment operation. Together, this microfluidic re-alignment strategy can be a platform technology to achieve precise positioning of multiple chambers for general microfluidic applications requiring long-term parallel monitoring of cell and biochemical activities.