fibers
Taking Microfluidics to New Lengths
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Microfluidic fiber sorting a solution containing either live or dead cells. The type of cell being imaged and the real time voltage (30v) is displayed at bottom. It is easy to imagine how this could be used to sort a mixture of live and dead cells. Credit: Yuan et al., PNAS
Microfluidics—the manipulation of fluids on a microscopic scale— has made it possible to produce “lab-on-a-chip” devices that detect, for instance, the presence of Ebola virus in a single drop of blood. Now, researchers hope to apply the precision of microfluidics to a much broader range of biomedical problems. Their secret? Move the microlab from chips to fibers.
To do this, an NIH-funded team builds microscopic channels into individual synthetic polymer fibers reaching 525 feet, or nearly two football fields long! As shown in this video, the team has already used such fibers to sort live cells from dead ones about 100 times faster than current methods, relying only on natural differences in the cells’ electrical properties. With further design and development, the new, fiber-based systems hold great promise for, among other things, improving kidney dialysis and detecting metastatic cancer cells in a patient’s bloodstream.
