Optofluidic Devices for Droplet and Cell Manipulation

The area of lab-on-a-chip offers exciting new capabilities for chemical/biological assays - with increased automatic, throughput and sensitivity of detection, and reduced sample and reagent usage. The field has seen remarkable progress in the last decade with applications ranging from drug development to point-of-care diagnostics. Our group has focused on the development of semiconductor-based optoelectrowetting (OEW) and optoelectronic tweezers (OET) platforms, which has the respective ability to perform droplets and cells/particles operations over the device surfaces.

In this talk, I will present on the progress we have made on both the OEW and OET platforms. For OEW, a novel optimization model has been developed to accurately predict the interaction of droplets, semiconductor layers, and a programmable DLP based optical source. Consequently, parallel and arrayed droplet manipulation has been enabled over a large operation area (cm x cm). In addition, critical droplet operations such as mixing, splitting, dispensing has been demonstrated. In biological application, I will present our work on parallel, real-time, isothermal polymerase chain reaction (PCR) detection of Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 in droplet arrays. For OET, I will present on our effort in long-term culture of adherent mammalian single cells into colonies. OET Surface functionalization enables large (0.5 mm diameter) growth patches where single cells can adhere and proliferate. Vascular single cells, derived from transgenic mouse, are cultured into colonal assays and their proliferation and differentiation potential characterized. Lastly, I will explain the link between the OEW and OET devices and how both droplet and particle manipulation can be enabled on a unified platform.

Speaker: Shao Ning Pei, UC Berkeley