Lab-on-Chip for Pathogen Detection and Cell Analysis

This book covers two key topics in Lab-on-Chips. The first topic, rapid pathogen detection, is of the utmost importance for human health and safety reasons. The most common problem encountered with current pathogen monitoring techniques is the inverse relationship between specificity and speed. One strategy to overcome this challenge is to develop a front-end technology that can quickly concentrate an environmental sample and by doing so improves the signal to noise ratio in the back-end assay. We have thus explored the suitability of an insulator based dielectrophoretic (iDEP) pressure-driven microfluidic device which provides an elegant means of achieving selective biophysical sample concentration. For the second topic, I will describe a pulse generating microfluidic device for single cell analysis. At present, single cell analysis is challenging since it requires single cell trapping and local biofluidic delivery. To address this need, I have designed and fabricated a microfluidic device that can trap an array of cells and deliver pulsed biochemical reagent to these cells.