Micro valve system for individual cell transportation in microfluidic chip

Abstract

Recently, micro valves to control some kinds of fluids in channels in a microchip have been developed. Now we pay attention to in-chip somatic cell cloning with microfluidic technology. There are some steps, cell supply, cutting, sorting, coupling, fusion and so on, for this work. And we focused on a cell supply system spending cells one by one in microfluidic chip, and attempt to transport an individual cell to objective course by the control of pressure valves. Here, we made three kinds valves, a) open channel 2-layer valve, b) open channel 3-layer valve, and c) close channel 2-layer valve. We compare these valves about interception condition of micro channel flow and time to take for open/close. And then we evaluated them with suitable for the smooth cell transportation by these comparisons.