Title :
Cross-Contamination Avoidance for Droplet Routing in Digital Microfluidic Biochips
Author :
Zhao, Yang ; Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
Author_Institution :
Adv. Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA
fDate :
6/1/2012 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Recent advances in digital microfluidics have enabled droplet-based biochip devices for DNA sequencing, immunoassays, clinical chemistry, and protein crystallization. Since cross-contamination between droplets of different biomolecules can lead to erroneous outcomes for bioassays, the avoidance of cross-contamination during droplet routing is a key design challenge for biochips. We propose a droplet-routing method that avoids cross-contamination in the optimization of droplet flow paths. The proposed approach targets disjoint droplet routes and synchronizes wash-droplet routing with functional droplet routing, in order to reduce the duration of droplet routing while avoiding the cross-contamination between different droplet routes. In order to avoid cross-contamination between successive routing steps, an optimization technique is used to minimize the number of wash operations that must be used between successive routing steps. Two real-life biochemical applications are used to evaluate the proposed droplet-routing methods.
Keywords :
DNA; crystallisation; drops; lab-on-a-chip; microfluidics; network routing; proteins; DNA sequencing; bioassays; biomolecule droplet; clinical chemistry; cross-contamination avoidance; digital microfluidic biochips; droplet flow path optimization; droplet-based biochip devices; functional droplet routing; immunoassays; protein crystallization; real-life biochemical applications; wash-droplet routing; Arrays; Clocks; Electrodes; Pins; Routing; Synchronization; Transportation; Biochip; cross-contamination avoidance; droplet routing; microfluidics;
Journal_Title :
Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TCAD.2012.2183369