Chemical and Environmental Engineering Institute, Dalian University, Dalian, 116622, China.
Environmental Micro Total Analysis Lab, Dalian University, Dalian, 116622, China.
Bioprocess Biosyst Eng. 2019 May;42(5):785-797. doi: 10.1007/s00449-019-02082-0. Epub 2019 Feb 4.
We present an automatic design process for microfluidic dilution network towards marine ecological toxicity assessment on microalgae. Based on the hydraulic-electric circuit analogy, we defined an abstract specification using computer-aided designing system. Several approaches, especially circuit partition, were applied to minimize design effort. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was exploited to convert the electrics specification to fabrication model. We automatically designed the combinational-mixing-serial dilution microfluidics to generate parallel stepwise gradients for mixing chemicals (binary/ternary/quaternary mixture) using the present algorithm. We critically discussed design rules and evaluated the microfluidic performance by colorimetric analysis. To examine whether these microfluidic chips can be used for toxicity test on microalgae, single and joint toxic effects of heavy metals (copper, mercury, zinc, and cadmium) were examined on line. In all cases, dose-related toxic responses were successfully detected. These results provided a solution for designing resistive network using circuit partition and CFD-based optimization and a route to develop a promising user-friendly alternative for microalgae bioassays as well as cell-based screening experiments in risk assessment.
我们提出了一种用于微流控稀释网络的自动设计流程，用于海洋生态毒性评估中的微藻。基于液压 - 电路类比，我们使用计算机辅助设计系统定义了一个抽象规范。应用了几种方法，特别是电路分区，以最小化设计工作。计算流体动力学 (CFD) 模拟被用来将电气规范转换为制造模型。我们使用当前算法自动设计组合混合串联稀释微流控，以生成用于混合化学物质（二元/三元/四元混合物）的并行逐步梯度。我们通过比色分析批判性地讨论了设计规则并评估了微流控性能。为了检查这些微流控芯片是否可用于微藻的毒性测试，我们在线检查了重金属（铜、汞、锌和镉）对微藻的单一和联合毒性效应。在所有情况下，都成功地检测到了剂量相关的毒性反应。这些结果为使用电路分区和基于 CFD 的优化设计电阻网络提供了一种解决方案，并为开发一种有前途的用户友好型替代方案提供了一种途径，用于微藻生物测定以及风险评估中的基于细胞的筛选实验。
