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Micro/Nanofluidics Devices for Nucleic Acids and Cell Analysis

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A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "B：Biology and Biomedicine".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2024) | Viewed by 6741

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Jinping Luo

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Guest Editor

State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Institute of Electronics Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Interests: electrochemical biosensors; microfluidic platforms; microelectrode arrays; nerve signal detection; point-of-care testing

Dr. Yang Wang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 111 Church Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Interests: nucleic acid analysis; biomedical MEMS devices; microfluidic devices; electrochemical biosensors; point-of-care testing

Dr. Xiaoxing Xing

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China
Interests: microfluidic platforms; electrokinetics; high-throughput single cell sequencing and analysis; conducting elastomer based sensing

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Micro/nanofluidics technology, having the advantages of precise fluid control and minimal reagent use, has received great attention for a wide variety of applications, including diagnosis, electronics, nanofabrication and cell-based screening. Furthermore, the integration of micro/nanofluidics with nucleic acid or cell analysis leads to novel analysis devices, advancing new research hotspots. The combination of micro/nanofluidics devices with nucleic acid has been used to improve the diagnosis of numerous infectious diseases, early cancer screening and treatment assessment. Moreover, microelectrode arrays integrated with microfluidics have important application prospects in exploring the mechanisms of neurological diseases and the fields of drug screening, neural computing and organ chips.

This Special Issue, “Micro/Nanofluidics Devices for Nucleic Acids and Cell Analysis”, seeks to showcase research papers, short communications and review articles focusing on the effective integration of micro/nanofluidic devices and nucleic acid testing methods. Particular attention will be paid to innovative applications that can improve upon existing medical devices and brain–machine interfaces. Also of interest is the development of micro/nano fluidic devices for nucleic analysis, which presents a great challenge as many steps, including cell or virus lysis, nucleic acid extraction and enrichment and nucleic acid amplification or detection signal amplification, must be accomplished by a sensitive, portable yet low-cost chip.

As the field of micro/nanofluidics devices for nucleic acids and cell analysis has a wide scope and touches upon many application areas, it is often difficult to locate a single source of relevant information.

Dr. Jinping Luo
Dr. Yang Wang
Dr. Xiaoxing Xing
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Micromachines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Dr. Jinping Luo
Dr. Yang Wang
Dr. Xiaoxing Xing
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Keywords

gene sequencing
DNA storage
nucleic acid amplification detection
methylation analysis
single nucleotide polymorphism
microRNA detection
spatial transcriptome sequencing
digital nucleic acid amplification
CRISPR-based detection nucleic acid molecule detection
point-of-care devices
micro-electrode array
biomedical MEMS/NEMS devices
paper-based devices
microfluidic/nanofluidic devices
microdroplets

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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10 pages, 1225 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rapid Detection of Malaria Based on Hairpin-Mediated Amplification and Lateral Flow Detection

by Yang Zhang, Lihui Ke, Tao Sun, Yang Liu, Bo Wei and Minghua Du

Micromachines 2023, 14(10), 1917; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi14101917 - 09 Oct 2023

Viewed by 976

Abstract

Malaria is listed as one of the three most hazardous infectious diseases worldwide. Travelers and migrants passing through exit and entry ports are important sources of malaria pandemics globally. Developing accurate and rapid detection technology for malaria is important. Here, a novel hairpin-mediated amplification (HMA) technique was proposed for the detection of four Plasmodium species, including P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, and P. ovale. Based on the conserved nucleotide sequence of Plasmodium, specific primers and probes were designed for the HMA process, and the amplicon can be detected using lateral flow detection (LFD); the results can be read visually without specialized equipment. The specificity of HMA-LFD was evaluated using nucleic acids extracted from four different Plasmodium species and two virus species. The sensitivity of HMA-LFD was valued using 10× serial dilutions of plasmid containing the template sequence. Moreover, 78 blood samples were collected to compare HMA-LFD and qPCR. The HMA-LFD results were all positive for four different Plasmodium species and negative for the other two virus species. The sensitivity of HMA-LFD was tested to be near five copies/μL. The analysis of clinical samples indicated that the consistency of HMA-LFD and qPCR was approximately 96.15%. Based on these results, the HMA-LFD assay was demonstrated to be a rapid, sensitive, and specific technique for the detection of Plasmodium and has great advantages for on-site detection in low-resource areas and exit and entry ports. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micro/Nanofluidics Devices for Nucleic Acids and Cell Analysis)

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13 pages, 5630 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Design of a Digital LAMP Detection Platform Based on Droplet Microfluidic Technology

by Liying Jiang, Xianghao Lan, Linjiao Ren, Mingzhu Yang, Bo Wei and Yang Wang

Micromachines 2023, 14(5), 1077; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi14051077 - 19 May 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1549

Abstract

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a rapid and high-yield amplification technology for specific DNA or RNA molecules. In this study, we designed a digital loop-mediated isothermal amplification (digital-LAMP)-functioning microfluidic chip to achieve higher sensitivity for detection of nucleic acids. The chip could generate droplets and collect them, based on which we could perform Digital-LAMP. The reaction only took 40 min at a constant temperature of 63 °C. The chip enabled highly accurate quantitative detection, with the limit of detection (LOD) down to 10² copies μL⁻¹. For better performance while reducing the investment of money and time in chip structure iterations, we used COMSOL Multiphysics to simulate different droplet generation ways by including flow-focusing structure and T-junction structure. Moreover, the linear structure, serpentine structure, and spiral structure in the microfluidic chip were compared to study the fluid velocity and pressure distribution. The simulations provided a basis for chip structure design while facilitating chip structure optimization. The digital-LAMP-functioning chip proposed in the work provides a universal platform for analysis of viruses. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micro/Nanofluidics Devices for Nucleic Acids and Cell Analysis)

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Review

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25 pages, 5770 KiB

Open AccessReview

Recent Progress and Perspectives on Neural Chip Platforms Integrating PDMS-Based Microfluidic Devices and Microelectrode Arrays

by Shihong Xu, Yaoyao Liu, Yan Yang, Kui Zhang, Wei Liang, Zhaojie Xu, Yirong Wu, Jinping Luo, Chengyu Zhuang and Xinxia Cai

Micromachines 2023, 14(4), 709; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi14040709 - 23 Mar 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3717

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a spurt of progress in the application of the encoding and decoding of neural activities to drug screening, diseases diagnosis, and brain–computer interactions. To overcome the constraints of the complexity of the brain and the ethical considerations of in vivo research, neural chip platforms integrating microfluidic devices and microelectrode arrays have been raised, which can not only customize growth paths for neurons in vitro but also monitor and modulate the specialized neural networks grown on chips. Therefore, this article reviews the developmental history of chip platforms integrating microfluidic devices and microelectrode arrays. First, we review the design and application of advanced microelectrode arrays and microfluidic devices. After, we introduce the fabrication process of neural chip platforms. Finally, we highlight the recent progress on this type of chip platform as a research tool in the field of brain science and neuroscience, focusing on neuropharmacology, neurological diseases, and simplified brain models. This is a detailed and comprehensive review of neural chip platforms. This work aims to fulfill the following three goals: (1) summarize the latest design patterns and fabrication schemes of such platforms, providing a reference for the development of other new platforms; (2) generalize several important applications of chip platforms in the field of neurology, which will attract the attention of scientists in the field; and (3) propose the developmental direction of neural chip platforms integrating microfluidic devices and microelectrode arrays. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micro/Nanofluidics Devices for Nucleic Acids and Cell Analysis)

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