Surface Acoustic Wave Actuated Lab-on-Chip System for Single Cell Analysis

Abstract

Collection, selection, amplification and detection of minimal amounts of biological samples became part of everyday life in medical and biological laboratories. The goal of the lab-on-a-chip technology is to automate standard laboratory processes and to analyze smallest samples reproducibly and reliably in a miniaturized format. Until now, however, microfluidic devices are not yet standardized equipment found in biologists' toolboxes. Just one of the obstacles is the difficulty of producing them. We review various approaches for lab-on-chip systems reported in the literature but focus on our own system, based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) actuation. Finally, we present a freely programmable planar chip system actuated by this operating principle and show that it has several advantages over 'conventional' microfluidic channel systems. Apart from avoiding the notorious problems of clogging, large pressure drops, and large surface area, our approach minimizes the risk of contamination and loss of analyte. Entering pointof-care diagnosis, the necessity of single cell analysis is dramatically increasing. To optimize a tumor therapy, for example, knowledge of the genetic composition of the heterogenic tumor tissue is essential. Hence, there exists the need for a reliable analysis system, which can be easily adapted to altering problems without reduction in reliability and reproducibility.

4D Printing: Enabling Technology for Microrobotics Applications

“…Various actuation strategies have been investigated, such as dielectrophoresis (DEP), [64][65][66][67][68][69][70] magnetophoresis, [71,72] electrowetting on a dielectric (EWOD), [73] and aurface acoustic wave (SAW) activation. [74] For sensing, exteroceptive sensors are typically used for proof-of-concept. [63] Indeed, proprioceptive sensors are challenging to integrate in the lab-on-chip devices.…”

Point-of-Care Platforms

“…Accordingly, the waves depend on the interaction process. Even single cells can be monitored using SAW devices in lab-on-a-chip systems (93).…”

Micro- and nano-force evaluation of bioengineered muscle cells: a non-contact two-dimensional biosensing using surface acoustic wave devices

“…The acoustic wave properties such as resonant frequency, phase shift etc are very sensitive to surface perturbations like strain and force. As a result, SAWs are very useful in developing highly sensitive and high frequency sensors for gas detection [13,14], measurement of temperature [15,16], torque [17][18][19], strain [8,[20][21][22][23] and biological matter [24][25][26][27][28].…”