Plant-inspired TransfOrigami microfluidics

Abstract

The healthy functioning of the plants’ vasculature depends on their ability to respond to environmental changes. In contrast, synthetic microfluidic systems have rarely demonstrated this environmental responsiveness. Plants respond to environmental stimuli through nastic movement, which inspires us to introduce transformable microfluidics: By embedding stimuli-responsive materials, the microfluidic device can respond to temperature, humidity, and light irradiance. Furthermore, by designing a foldable geometry, these responsive movements can follow the preset origami transformation. We term this device TransfOrigami microfluidics (TOM) to highlight the close connection between its transformation and the origami structure. TOM can be used as an environmentally adaptive photomicroreactor. It senses the environmental stimuli and feeds them back positively into photosynthetic conversion through morphological transformation. The principle behind this morphable microsystem can potentially be extended to applications that require responsiveness between the environment and the devices, such as dynamic artificial vascular networks and shape-adaptive flexible electronics.

Pixelating Responsive Structural Color via a Bioinspired Morphable Concavity Array (MoCA) Composed of 2D Photonic Crystal Elastomer Actuators

“…In addition, the water‐rich hydrogel will collapse structurally due to water evaporation from prolonged exposure to air, while the water‐free elastomer can then support the actuator structure as a skeleton. [ 12 ] When illuminated with natural light, the upper surface of PC‐EA is black due to the GPDMS substrate (Figure S3, Supporting Information). However, under the omnidirectional incident light at a view angle of 20°, the PC‐EA surface displays brilliant red color due to the 2D‐PC with nanoscaled structural periodicity (Figure 1D).…”

“…Specifically, the disparities in swelling rate between the pNIPAM and the GPDMS in response to the solvent enable the morphing response in the MoC ( Figure ). [ 12 ] When exposed to ethanol, pNIPAM can absorb the ethanol and swell more rapidly than GPDMS (Figure 3A, S5, and Table S1, Supporting Information). [ 13 ] The expansion of pNIPAM is restricted by the GPDMS, so if the bonding between pNIPAM and GPDMS is sufficiently tight, the pNIPAM layer is subject to tension while the GPDMS layer is under compressive stress, leading to internal tensions.…”

“…[ 13 ] The expansion of pNIPAM is restricted by the GPDMS, so if the bonding between pNIPAM and GPDMS is sufficiently tight, the pNIPAM layer is subject to tension while the GPDMS layer is under compressive stress, leading to internal tensions. [ 12 ] Consequently, the MoC structure is buckled downward to release the internal tensions. While releasing tensions, MoC is restricted by circular elastomeric partitions.…”

Cascaded microfluidic circuits for pulsatile filtration of extracellular vesicles from whole blood for early cancer diagnosis

“…By exploiting the good scalability of microfluidic circuit, efforts can be drawn to develop compact chips integrating multiple filtration units. Second, the EV isolation and downstream biomarker analysis can be streamlined in a single microfluidic device by using the electric circuit analogy to design a sequential-flow system (31,(53)(54)(55), which may further simplify the personnel operation, improve the reproducibility, and reduce the assay time. Last, although the microfluidic pulsatile filtration removed ~95% of protein contents, ~92% of LDL, and ~93% of VLDL from blood samples, there may be still a considerable amount of proteins and other bioparticles contaminating the isolated EVs.…”

“…Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are lipid bilayer–enclosed bioparticles with a diameter of 30 to 250 nm that are actively secreted by most mammalian cells, particularly tumor cells, into their surrounding environments and play important roles in cell-to-cell communications ( 1 – 53 ). Tumor-derived EVs (tEVs) carry a payload of proteins and nucleic acids reflecting the molecular characteristics of cell origin and have been abundantly found in bodily fluids such as blood.…”