Development of an Efficient Centrifugal Microfluidic Platform for Automated Chemical Cell Lysis

Applications of microfluidic technologies in medical diagnostics continue to increase, particularly in the field of nucleic acid diagnostics. Although much attention has been focused on the development of nucleic acid amplification and detection platforms, cell lysis procedure, as one of the most fundamental steps of sample preparation have not been taken into consideration sufficiently. In this paper, the design and characterization of a novel centrifugal microfluidic platform for chemical cell lysis is presented. The developed configuration employs passive pneumatic reciprocating mixer and siphon valve for rigorous mixing of lysis buffer and cell samples alongside precise control over fluid flow. Experiments were conducted with white blood cells, separated from human whole blood, to demonstrate the performance. Compared to commercial manual protocol for cell lysing, the experimental results indicated that the proposed method is greatly effective in realizing a chemical cell lysis system on lab-on-a-disc (LoaD) with high throughput in terms of purity and yield of DNA. The developed system provides efficient, simple, and fully automated chemical cell lysis which can be easily integrated into sample-to-answer systems with applications in point-of-care settings