ABSTRACT
A Lego®-like swappable fluidic module (SFM) is proposed in this research. We designed and fabricated selected modular fluidic components, including functional and auxiliary types that can be effortlessly swapped and integrated into a variety of modular devices to rapidly assemble a fully-portable, disposable fluidic system. In practice, an integrated SFM uses finger-operated, electricity-free pumps to deliver fluids. Using a swirling mechanism, the vortex mixer can rapidly mix two liquids in a one-shot mixing event. We demonstrate the successful application of this SFM in several microfluidic applications, such as the synthesis of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) from chloroauric acid (HAuCl4), and nucleic acid amplification from the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) with a capillary convective polymerase chain reaction (ccPCR).
ABSTRACT
This research reports the design, analysis, integration, and test of a prototype of a real-time convective polymerase chain reaction (RT-cPCR) machine that uses a color charged coupled device (CCD) for detecting the emission of fluorescence intensity from an RT-cPCR mix in a microliter volume glass capillary. Because of its simple mechanism, DNA amplification involves employing the cPCR technique with no need for thermocycling control. The flow pattern and temperature distribution can greatly affect the cPCR process in the capillary tube, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was conducted in this study for the first time to estimate the required period of an RT-cPCR cycle. This study also tested the PCR mix containing hepatitis B virus (HBV) plasmid samples by using SYBR Green I fluorescence labeling dye to assess the prototype performance. The measured results from the image-processing scheme indicate that the RT-cPCR prototype with a CCD-based fluorometer can achieve similar DNA quantification reproducibility compared to commercial machines, even when the initial DNA concentration in the test PCR mix is reduced to 10 copies/µL.
