Manipulation of zebrafish's orientation using artificial cilia in a microchannel with actively adaptive wall design.
The zebrafish is a powerful genetic model organism especially in the biomedical chapter for new drug discovery and development. The genetic toolbox which this vertebrate possesses opens a new window to investigate the etiology of human diseases with a high degree genetic similarity. Still, the requirements of laborious and time-consuming of contemporary zebrafish processing assays limit the procedure in carrying out such genetic screen at high throughput. Here, a zebrafish control scheme was initiated which includes the design and validation of a microfluidic platform to significantly increase the throughput and performance of zebrafish larvae manipulation using the concept of artificial cilia actuation. A moving wall design was integrated into this microfluidic platform first time in literature to accommodate zebrafish inside the microchannel from 1 day post-fertilization (dpf) to 6 dpf and can be further extended to 9 dpf for axial orientation control in a rotational range between 0 to 25 degrees at the minimum step of 2-degree increment in a stepwise manner. This moving wall feature was performed through the deflection of shape memory alloy wire embedded inside the microchannel controlled by the electrical waveforms with high accuracy.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
Karthick
K
Mani
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
Tsung-Chun
TC
Chang Chien
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
Bivas
B
Panigrahi
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan.
Chia-Yuan
CY
Chen
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D002923:Cilia / Q000502:physiology; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques / Q000295:instrumentation*; D023421:Models, Animal; D000072458:Orientation, Spatial; D015027:Zebrafish / Q000502:physiology*