Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Analyst. 2019 Aug 5;144(16):4962-4971. doi: 10.1039/c9an00905a.
The research of fungi is of great importance in a number of fields, such as environmental and healthcare studies. While there are a large number of optical and molecular methods available for characterization and identification of fungi and their spores, their isolation is still conducted using slow and labor-intensive methods. Here, we develop a microfluidic device for the continuous separation of fungal spores from other eukaryotic cells. The spores were separated through the microfluidic device by expanding pinched flow fractionation (PFF) containing the spores, achieving a spatial separation perpendicular to the flow direction according to the spore size. Further branch flow fractionation (BFF) and co-flow of a Newtonian and viscoelastic fluid were used to enhance the separation performance. Using this microfluidic device, we demonstrated the separation of two different types of fungal spores and further separation of fungal spores from eukaryotic cells with a separation efficiency of above 90%. Compared to the existing conventional methods, our microfluidic flow focusing device requires little manual handling and uses small amounts of samples without any pre-treatment steps of the samples.
真菌的研究在许多领域都非常重要，例如环境和医疗保健研究。虽然有许多光学和分子方法可用于真菌及其孢子的特征描述和鉴定，但它们的分离仍然采用缓慢且劳动密集型的方法。在这里，我们开发了一种用于从其他真核细胞中连续分离真菌孢子的微流控装置。通过扩展包含孢子的夹流分馏（PFF），使孢子在微流控装置中分离，根据孢子大小实现沿流动方向垂直的空间分离。进一步采用分支流分馏（BFF）和牛顿流体和粘弹性流体的共流来增强分离性能。使用这种微流控装置，我们演示了两种不同类型的真菌孢子的分离，并且进一步从真核细胞中分离真菌孢子，分离效率超过 90%。与现有的常规方法相比，我们的微流控流聚焦装置需要很少的手动操作，并且使用少量的样品，而无需对样品进行任何预处理步骤。
