Roland Zengerle, Director Department of Microsystems Engineering, IMTEK
Abstract
Assay miniaturization requires the sequential combination of many different microfluidic unit operations such as reagent storage and release, extraction of certain molecular species from complex samples, metering, mixing, incubation, enrichment and/or amplification and detection. Centrifugal microfluidics enables a seamless integration of those processing steps and this way enables miniaturization, integration, automation and parallelization of biomolecular and biochemical assays. We demonstrate that those Lab-on-a-Chip implementations can be designed for operation in common commercialized instruments like laboratory centrifuges, DVD drives, or real-time PCR cyclers. This approach could render the expensive development of tailor-made instruments superfluous and could significantly reduce market entry barriers for developing Lab-on-a-Chip solutions. It also provides instrument companies the opportunity to upgrade their devices e.g. by integrating complex sample preparation protocols prior to the detection for which the instruments are designed. We successfully demonstrate this approach for the following applications: Cartridge for automated DNA-purification operated on a standard laboratory centrifuges, Lab-on-a-Chip solution for DNA pre-amplification, aliquoting, and real-time PCR operated on a slightly modified real-time thermocycler (Rotor-Gene) with < 10 copy sensitivity, Qualitative isothermal DNA detection by recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) with time-to-result of less than 15 minutes, also operated on the Qiagen / Rotor-Gene platform.