The Design And Research Of Electrical Cell Lysis Biochip

Cell lysis is an essential step in biochips which based-on the research of intracellular materials reaction and analysis for extracting intracellular materials such as DNA, RNA, and protein. Electrical cell lysis had been demonstrated in a number of reports in recent years and interest in electrical cell lysis had increased. We adopted the means of using electric field lysing because it can greatly simplify purification steps for preparation of biological samples and avoid denaturing of protein compared with conventional chemical methods and can be integrated into other bio-chip conveniently because its micromation.A low-voltage electrical cell lysis chip was designed and fabricated. It was designed to be a part of microfluidics systems where cell lysing was needed to for further analysis. It also can be used for sample preparation in general diagnosis and bio-experiments. Ti/Pt microelectrode was fabricated based on glass by standard photoresist processing of lift-off processing. The cell lysis chip acquire the high electric field strength(kV/cm)for cell lysis by applying an pulsed voltage to six pairs of micro-gap electrodes. A pulse generator was designed also. It was made with a AT89S52 microcontroller application circuit and an analogue circuit of output. It can generate regular DC pulses. BHK21, C2C12 cells are tested with the micro-fabricated chip. The lysis of BHK21, C2C12 cells were observed by a inverted microscope. The experimental observation suggests that BHK21, C2C12 cells were completely disintegrated by the pulsed electric field. In addition, the voltage required for lysing was reduced to only 3V by making the electrode gap on the order of microns and the intensity of the electric field needed is 0.6kV/cm.The experimental observation suggests that the voltage for cell lysis and the lysis rate had changed when applied different duration of pulses. Lysis rate was influenced by the voltage and duration of the pulse and the conductance of the cell suspension. We found the half-close micro-channels formed by clean PMMA with glass was useful for preventing bubbling when applied pulsed electric field.In conclusion, the present cell lysis chip is capable of cell lysis at a low DC pulsed voltage with high lysis rate; thus, it is suitable for a sample pretreatment component of a microfluidics or lab-on-a-chip.