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Digital Microfluidics
herrd0kt0r writes "A brilliant team of researches at Duke University have been working on digital microfluidics, with potential applications in biotech labs-on-a-chip, optical routers/switches, wavelength division multiplexers and the like. Essentially, this team has developed a solid state device capable of moving very small drops of fluid over very small distances with very little power. From their website they remark that "[m]icrofluidic processing is performed on unit-sized packets of fluid which are transported, stored, mixed, reacted, or analyzed in a discrete manner using a standard set of basic instructions."
Their site includes eight .mpgs demonstrating their microfluidics tech in real-time. Be sure to take a gander at this video showing programmable flow of droplets as well as this one showing droplet splitting and formation."
W00t! No more pipetting.
This has some very useful applications. I work in a genetics lab doing a lot of molecular biology work with primate genomes.
It's still a needle in a haystack issue. We deal with nanograms of DNA suspended in microliters of liquids. The microliter is pretty much the limit of what we can manually manipulate, anything less and it gets damn expensive. As it is, there's a lot of suspending, centrifuging, and shaking going on in the lab; a lot of work and time to manipulate a very small amount of material.
If I could just load my sample onto a microfluidics device and 'manipulate' everything by executing commands, life would be much easier. You'd probably avoid a lot of loss and contamination issues with this type of technology. The amounts of expensive reagents used could be reduced significantly. It'd be like a tiny tiny molecular biology lab in a box.
Those are just some of the research possiblities. I'm sure you could have a 'farm' of these microfluidics devices to do production level work.
-- "Sucks to your ass-mar"
this whole shebang about microdroplet formation and movement is especially incredible when considering lab-on-a-chip applications for the biotech industry.
one of the biggest problems with current solutions is the difficulty in utilizing small samples of blood/fluid. the solid-state approach of this team is great in that there are, by definition, NO MOVING PARTS! nothin to break down, and nothin to shrink down either. so you can keep things puny. the fluid volume in these experiments are in the _nanoliter_ range. and they have demonstrated their ability to split and reform droplets.
so imagine this: you have a limited quantity of blood to analyze, and wanna run a bazillion tests. no sweat. with this tech, you can suck off puny portions at a time! you can move them around however you'd like as well, to whatever assays you'd like to run.
the team has also demonstrated excellent droplet mixing results as well. why is this important? well, with fluid volumes that small, it is difficult to mix solutions. their electrowetting approach has yielded results that show excellent mixing. this is good for labs-on-a-chip as well, as you may need to mix different things together for certain assays.
the potential for this kind of technology is pretty staggering. very small. very little power. no moving parts. use em for switches of many sorts! or hell, did you check out the video where they move the drop at over 200 hertz?!
HOLY SHIZNIT!
that's fast! eesh! but screw all this serious stuff. i think we can _all_ enjoy the first video showing the droplet performing humping maneuvers. aww jeah.
Maybe it could be used to write your name in yellow on a single snowflake.