Fluidics and cultured cells on pnc-Si
As a proof-of-principle, Henry and I have been working on a microfluidic device for flowing blood cells/particles across cultured cells on pnc-Si. More on why this is important later. We’ve come up with a prototype and I’ve been testing it out. I will include schematics later but here are the first couple of movies I’ve gotten.
This movie shows 10.5um PS beads flowing across 1 slit of a 5-slit square chip. Endothelial cells were grown for 1 day before doing the flow – you can see the cells and vacuoles within in the cells. I started the movie a few seconds after the bead solution entered the device and the beads started sticking to the membrane and forming clumps. I also wasn’t impressed with the distribution of particle sizes with this sample. However, this showed that it was possible to get flow across cultured bEnd3 with these PDMS prototypes.
To try to make this experiment more relevant, I decided to flow blood across the device. I collected some of my blood, diluted it in DMEM and started flow across a different device. I didn’t dilute the blood enough, so there are lots of cells, but you can clearly see red blood cells flowing parallel to the slit. I have one more device to try this out on today.