Clients in Action

Lab on a Chip
The dream of using large scale integration in microfluidics for portable, high throughput applications has been stymied due to the fact that the shrinking of microfluidic circuits has not been matched by a corresponding miniaturization of the actuation and interfacing elements that control the circuits. By combining multi-layer soft-lithography with shape memory alloys (SMA), researchers in the KNI/BI Microfluidic Foundry at Caltech demonstrate electronically activated microfluidic components such as valves, pumps, latches and multiplexers that are assembled on printed circuit boards (PCBs). Electronic control of elastomeric microfluidic circuits with shape memory actuators —by Saurabh Vyawahare, Suresh Sitaula, Sujitha Martin, Dvin Adalian and Axel Scherer, was published in a recent issue of the RSC journal Lab on a Chip.

Microchemostat Chip
Jason Kelly writes —"My research involves extending a microchemostat chip developed by Frederick Balagadde in Steve Quake's lab. Thanks to the Foundry we were able to extend Frederick's design to include a crude cell sorting device that enabes the application of unique selective pressures to a population of cells growing in continous culture. By decoupling design and fabrication the Foundry has enabled us to pursue a line of research that would otherwise be impossible in our lab. Thanks very much for the great work!"

Protein Crystallography
Megan Anderson writes —"Our research focuses on the use of microfluidic devices for protein crystallography. Our crystallization platform consists of three devices to identify crystallization conditions, screen proteins against these conditions, and scale up crystal hits to use for X-ray diffraction studies. The first device combinatorially produces thousands of conditions and tests each of these conditions against a protein sample to identify conditions that have a non-trivial affect on the protein's solubility. The second device is a crystallization screening chip that utilizes 240 parallel free interface diffusion crystallization experiments to test the identified conditions. The final device transports crystal hits from the screening chip to a larger free interface diffusion platform that can be used directly for X-ray diffraction studies and data collection. Using this suite of devices we have achieved an 80% success rate in the crystallization of challenging protein targets."

High School Student Research
During summer 2005 Marisol Salgado of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles was one of five high school seniors who conducted research as part of the CSULA-Caltech Partnership For Research and Education in Materials (PREM) Collaborative. Her work in the labs of Dr. Frank A. Gomez (PREM director) focused on developing microfluidic techniques for biological assays. Funded by NSF DMR-0351848

Student Collaborative Research
Cal State Los Angeles undergraduate student Alvaro Gomez is shown working on developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) on a microfluidic chip format in a joint project between Drs. Frank A. Gomez (Chemistry, Cal State Los Angeles) and Axel Scherer (Applied Physics, Caltech). Funded by a NSF PREM grant, students have the opportunity to conduct interdisciplinary research between the two institutions. Funded by NSF DMR-0351848 and CHE-0515363