Femtoliter nanofluidic valve utilizing glass deformation

Abstract

A femtoliter nanochannel open/close valve utilizing tiny glass deformation, which will enable highly-integrated glass nanofluidic devices, was proposed and demonstrated.

A Simple Low-Temperature Glass Bonding Process with Surface Activation by Oxygen Plasma for Micro/Nanofluidic Devices

“…Micro/nanofluidic devices were fabricated by the top-down fabrication of micro- and nanochannels on glass substrates, based on reported methods [ 8 , 30 , 31 ]. Nanochannels with sizes of 100 to 1000 nm were fabricated by electron beam lithography and dry etching.…”

Accelerated protein digestion and separation with picoliter volume utilizing nanofluidics

“…The design and function of the valve was described in the previous report. 38,39 The sample solution in the injector channel was driven to the separation channel. According to previous studies of nanofluidic liquid chromatography, as the channel length increases, the theoretical plate number becomes higher.…”

“…The valve chamber with the four-stepped nanostructure was fabricated by four sessions of EB lithography and RIE. The valve was designed based on our previous reports 38,39 in which details of the fabrication process, the verified results about leakage and response time of the valve were described. The diameter of each step was 40, 52, 64 and 75 μm.…”

“…To achieve this, we introduced an open/close valve by exploiting the physical deformation of glass on a nanometer scale to separately modify the nanochannel surfaces and to control the stop-and-flow of the sample liquids. 38,39 Herein, we developed an integrated nanofluidic device capable of performing tryptic digestion of a protein sample, chromatographic separation, and non-labeled detection with high consistency. The enzymatic reaction was performed efficiently using a surface-immobilized enzyme on the nanofluidic channel.…”

Size Sorting of Exosomes by Tuning the Thicknesses of the Electric Double Layers on a Micro-Nanofluidic Device

“…Nevertheless, these exosomes could not be further "sorted" or "classified" by their size, because of the random pore size in the columns for SEC. Other size-sorting methods have been proposed by using elaborate and highly regulated nanostructures integrated into micro-nanofluidic devices, due to the recent dramatic advancement in micro-and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS) [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) is a popular method, and it works by using micro-and nano-pillar arrays tilted at an angle to generate unique flow streamlines.…”