Architectural Design of Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips for Multi-Target Dilution of Biochemical Fluids

Abstract

Microfluidic technologies enable replacement of time-consuming and complex steps of biochemical laboratory protocols with a tiny chip. Sample preparation (i.e., dilution or mixing of fluids) is one of the primary tasks of any bioprotocol. In real-life applications where several assays need to be executed for different diagnostic purposes, the same sample fluid is often required with different target concentration factors (CFs). Although several multi-target dilution algorithms have been developed for digital microfluidic biochips, they are not efficient for implementation with continuous-flow-based microfluidic chips, which are preferred in the laboratories. In this article, we present a multi-target dilution algorithm (MTDA) for continuous-flow-based microfluidic biochips, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind. We design a flow-based rotary mixer with a suitable number of segments depending on the target-CF profile, error tolerance, and optimization criteria. To schedule several intermediate fluid-mixing tasks, we develop a multi-target scheduling algorithm (MTSA) aiming to minimize the usage of storage units while producing dilutions with multiple CFs. Furthermore, we propose a storage architecture for efficiently loading (storing) of intermediate fluids from (to) the storage units.