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.
