A research team recently developed “sliding walls” as a new technique for fluid control in microfluidic devices, allowing semi-rigid or rigid walls to slide inside a microfluidic chip. In a new report now on Nature: Microsystems & Nanoengineering, Bastien Venzac and a team of scientists at the Institute Curie and Sorbonne University in Paris, France, engineered several fluidic functions using sliding wall geometry. The device contained on/off switch valves to block or reconfigure channels depending on the wall geometry. The setup contained a hydrogel-based membrane to concentrate, purify and transport biomolecules from one channel to another. The technique is compatible with soft lithography methods for easy implementation based on typical fabrication workflows on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chips. The new method opens a route to a variety of microfluidic applications, forming simple, hand-driven devices for point-of-care applications in biological labs.
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Source: Phys.org