Mani Karthick, Chen Chia-Yuan
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
Biomicrofluidics. 2021 Feb 16;15(1):014109. doi: 10.1063/5.0026916. eCollection 2021 Jan.
Zebrafish is an emerging alternative model in behavioral and neurological studies for pharmaceutical applications. However, little is known regarding the effects of noise exposure on laboratory-grown zebrafish. Accordingly, this study commenced by exposing zebrafish embryos to loud background noise (≥200 Hz, 80 ± 10 dB) for five days in a microfluidic environment. The noise exposure was found to affect the larvae hatching rate, larvae length, and swimming performance. A microfluidic platform was then developed for the sorting/trapping of hatched zebrafish larvae using a non-invasive method based on light cues and acoustic actuation. The experimental results showed that the proposed method enabled zebrafish larvae to be transported and sorted into specific chambers of the microchannel network in the desired time frame. The proposed non-invasive trapping method thus has potentially profound applications in drug screening.
斑马鱼是药物应用行为学和神经学研究中一种新兴的替代模型。然而，关于噪声暴露对实验室养殖斑马鱼的影响，人们知之甚少。因此，本研究首先在微流控环境中将斑马鱼胚胎暴露于高声背景噪声（≥200 Hz，80±10 dB）下5天。结果发现，噪声暴露会影响幼虫孵化率、幼虫长度和游泳性能。随后，基于光信号和声学驱动开发了一种非侵入性方法，用于分选/捕获孵化后的斑马鱼幼虫的微流控平台。实验结果表明，该方法能够在所需的时间框架内将斑马鱼幼虫运输并分选到微通道网络的特定腔室中。因此，所提出的非侵入性捕获方法在药物筛选中具有潜在的深远应用。
