Microfluidics holds great promise to revolutionize various areas of biological engineering, such as single cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Despite the fact that intensive efforts have been devoted into the field in the past decades, microfluidics has not yet been adopted widely. It is increasingly realized that an effective system i...

The rapid identification of algae species is not only of practical importance when monitoring unwanted adverse effects such as eutrophication, but also when assessing the water quality of watersheds. Here, we demonstrate a lab-on-a-chip that functions as a compact robust tool for the fast screening, real-time monitoring, and initial classification of algae. The water-algae sample, flowing in a ...

Advances in molecular biology are enabling rapid and efficient analyses for effective intervention in domains like biology research, infectious disease management, food safety and bio-defense. The emergence of microfluidics and nanotechnologies has enabled both new capabilities and instrument sizes practical for point-of-care (POC). They have also introduced new functionality, enhanced the sens...

The popular veterinarian method of qualitative selection of animals oocytes for artificial fertilization is based on morphological aspects of cells. Selection is done by the trained veterinarian specialists observing under a microscope oocytes “flowing” in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) buffer. This is unsatisfactory selection method, one of the weakest points of agriculture breading industry,...

We investigated the application of two technologies for the fabrication of rectangular microchannels with reasonable path lengths for UV detection in UV transparent materials. The first approach uses inductively coupled plasma (ICP)–reactive ion etching (RIE) to fabricate channels in fused silica wafers, using a 4-mm-thick nickel layer as protective mask. The effects of the process parameters o...

Taking the next step from individual functional components to higher integrated devices, we present a feasibility study of a lab-on-a-chip system with five different components monolithically integrated on one substrate. These five components represent three main domains of microchip technology: optics, fluidics and electronics. In particular, this device includes an on-chip optically pumped li...

An electrochemical 'Lab-on-a-chip' for water toxicity detection is presented. This miniaturized device containing an array of nano liter electrochemical cells, which integrates bacteria and can emulate physiological reactions in response to different chemicals. Bacteria, which have been genetically engineered to respond to environmental stress, act as a sensor element and trigger a sequence of ...