The Design and Fabrication of a Microfluidic Landscaper

Abstract

Catalysis is identified as a feature of enzymes function, and kinetic analysis of the conversion generated by the reaction between proteins and enzymes is essential to understand and control them for biological applications. Due to the limitation of applying enzyme sequential and structural information for real catalytic behaviors and capabilities, new analysis tools are requested for the studies of new enzyme investigations. Therefore, novel integrated microfluidic systems for accurate and fast biocatalysts analysis could prompt to characterize enzyme catalysis with small reagent consumption required without sample preparation steps. With the advantages of total analysis system in a single chip, an integrated microfluidic landscaper has been developed with an advantage of manipulating tiny sample volumes in nano/pico-liter scale and many different ratios of substrate, inhibitor, and buffer on a single chip for conducting enzyme binding kinetics. The microfluidic landscaper consists of forty five parallel processors, and each processor has designed to complete one set of enzyme reaction including metering, mixing, and detecting. This automated microfluidic landscaper system makes it possible to achieve the catalytic performances of an enzyme as a series of three-dimensional landscapes. This system would also provide a view of the catalytic ability of an enzyme with a complete understanding of the factors that have an effect on it and the indispensable information needed to obtain the constants governing their influences.