2P283 Microfluidic chemostat for cell density control(25. Nonequilibrium state & Biological rhythm,Poster,The 52nd Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society of Japan(BSJ2014))

Abstract

Recently, synthetic biology based on constructive approaches, such as genetically engineering of living cells, has attracted attention. For genetic engineering, culturing living cells in a steady condition is required, and chemostats based on inflow and outflow of culture media are often used. However, it is difficult to observe a cell while culturing because chemostats require large volume of media (>0.1 L-). In this study, to conquer this problem, we propose a microfluidic chemostat based on water-in-oil microdroplets. The inflow and outflow of media are controlled by droplet fusion and fission. We formulated a numerical model and investigated it by simulations. We believe that this chemostat can be applied to single-cell observation and promote synthetic biology.