MRI: Acquisition of Equipment to Construct Microfluidic Instruments for use In Chemistry, Biology, and Materials Science

Brandeis University, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award from the Major Research Instrumentation supports Brandeis University with the acquisition of a semi-conductor manufacturing equipment to enable the development of microfluidic devices. These are devices, typically constructed of a square inch of plastic, that contain microscopic plumbing designed to precisely meter, mix, and store minute amounts of fluids. A bottleneck in research in chemistry, biology, and materials science is often the limited availability of the sample of interest, whether it be a new drug, protein, or synthetic material. Microfluidic devices are a way of reducing a thousand fold the volumes of liquids handled in current laboratories. Because these devices are manufactured using semiconductor technology the economies of scale realized by converting transistors from large vacuum tubes to microscopic semiconductors are now being achieved in fluid handling technologies through the use of microfluidics to miniaturize plumbing. The integration of microfluidics with semiconductor technology is leading to the creation of commercial "lab-on-a-chip" instruments and the transformation of laboratory practices in chemistry and biology. As an example of an application of this technology, one of the principal users of this equipment will manufacture microfluidic devices for protein crystallization. Protein crystals are needed in order to deduce the protein's structure, which is important in understanding the function of proteins, as well as the drugs designed for therapeutic purposes. The process of protein crystallization requires the trial of many different solvent conditions and the use of microfluidics will permit a thousand fold increase in throughput. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation supports Brandeis University with the acquisition of a semi-conductor manufacturing equipment to enable the development of microfluidic devices . These microfluidic instruments consist of an elastomeric polymer through which run channels of tens to hundreds of microns in height and width. Different microfluidic components are designed, fabricated, and combined into a single instrument (lab-on-a-chip) to precisely meter, mix, and store sub-nanoliter amounts of sample, solvent, and other reagents. The suite of equipment described above will provide the capability to design, manufacture, and operate microfluidic instruments that are customized for each application. For example, one of the principal users of this equipment will manufacture microfluidic devices for protein crystallization, where the need to process many different solvent conditions rapidly while consuming as little as possible of the protein provides the motivation to develop microfluidic devices. Another user will utilize microfluidic devices to study the kinetics of phase transitions in colloidal liquid crystals, where the requirement to rapidly mix reagents in a high resolution optical microscope drives the need for microfluidic devices, while a third investigator will study coupling between drops undergoing chemical reactions, where employment of microfluidic devices allows precise control of both the drop size and spatial configuration of the drops.