title: A disposable, roll-to-roll hot-embossed inertial microfluidic device for size-based sorting of microbeads and cells.
abstract: Inertial microfluidics has been a highly active area of research in recent years for high-throughput focusing and sorting of synthetic and biological microparticles. However, existing inertial microfluidic devices always rely on microchannels with high-aspect-ratio geometries (channel width w < channel height h) and small cross-sections (w×h < 50 × 100 μm(2)). Such deep and small structures increase fabrication difficulty and can limit manufacturing by large-scale and high-throughput production approaches such as roll-to-roll (R2R) hot embossing. In this work, we present a novel inertial microfluidic device using only a simple and low-aspect-ratio (LAR) straight microchannel (w > h) to achieve size-based sorting of microparticles and cells. The simple LAR geometry of the device enables successful high-throughput fabrication using R2R hot embossing. With optimized flow conditions and channel dimensions, we demonstrate continuous sorting of a mixture of 15 μm and 10 μm diameter microbeads with >97% sorting efficiency using the low-cost and disposable R2R chip. We further demonstrate size-based sorting of bovine white blood cells, demonstrating the ability to process real cellular samples in our R2R chip. We envision that this R2R hot-embossed inertial microfluidic chip will serve as a powerful yet low-cost and disposable tool for size-based sorting of synthetic microparticles in industrial applications or cellular samples in cell biology research and clinical diagnostics.
authors.affiliation: BioMicroSystems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA. ian.papautsky@uc.edu.
authors.forename: Xiao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liedert
authors.forename: Ralph
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Liedert
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Papautsky
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002417:Cattle; D002469:Cell Separation / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D056656:Lab-On-A-Chip Devices; D007962:Leukocytes; D044085:Microfluidics / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D008863:Microspheres; D019904:Polymethyl Methacrylate / Q000737:chemistry
chemical_list: D019904:Polymethyl Methacrylate