School of Mechanical and Advanced Materials Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, UNIST-gil 50, Eonyang-eup, Ulsan 689-798, Republic of Korea.
Lab Chip. 2012 Oct 21;12(20):3914-22. doi: 10.1039/c2lc40294g.
We describe a microfluidic concentrator array device that is integrated with microfabricated ratchet structures to concentrate motile bacterial cells in desired destinations with required cell densities. The device consists of many pairs of concentrators with a wide range of spacing distances on a chip, and allows cells in one concentrator to be physically separated from but chemically connected to cells in the other concentrator. Therefore, the device facilitates quantification of the effect of spacing distance on the cell-to-cell communication of synthetically engineered bacterial cells. In addition, the device enables us to control the cell number density in each concentrator unit by adjusting the concentration time and the density of cell suspensions, and the basic concentrator unit of the device can be repeatedly duplicated on a chip. Hence, the device not only facilitates an investigation of the effect of cell densities on cell-to-cell communication, but it can also be further applied to an investigation of cellular communication among multiple types of cells. Lastly, the device can be easily fabricated using a single-layered soft-lithography technology so that we believe it would provide a simple but robust means for many synthetic and systems biologists to simplify and speed up their investigations of the synthetic genetic circuits in bacterial cells.
我们描述了一种微流控浓缩器阵列装置，该装置与微加工棘轮结构集成在一起，可将运动细菌细胞集中在所需目的地，并达到所需的细胞密度。该设备由许多对在芯片上具有广泛间隔距离的浓缩器组成，并允许一个浓缩器中的细胞在物理上与另一个浓缩器中的细胞分离，但在化学上保持连接。因此，该设备有助于量化间隔距离对合成工程细菌细胞之间细胞间通信的影响。此外，该设备通过调整浓缩时间和细胞悬浮液的密度，可以控制每个浓缩器单元中的细胞数量密度，并且该设备的基本浓缩器单元可以在芯片上重复复制。因此，该设备不仅有助于研究细胞密度对细胞间通信的影响，而且还可以进一步应用于研究多种类型细胞之间的细胞通信。最后，该设备可以使用单层软光刻技术轻松制造，因此我们相信它将为许多合成和系统生物学家提供一种简单但强大的手段，以简化和加快他们对细菌细胞中合成遗传回路的研究。
