Sandia Digital Microfluidic Hub

in case of DNA sequencing the problem was the sample preparation the thing that Sandia brings to the equation is the the combination of the engineering and the science rather than trying to get everything into a single device we're focusing on the interconnectivity it's frankly potentially a game Cher for uh laboratory automation at the small scale in Livermore California a Sandia National Laboratories team is working to pave the way for the future of genetic analysis and personalized medicine hrut sequencing is a revolutionary technology that's uh it's changing the landscape of uh genomics and metagenomics and they provide uh Rich sequencing information at a cost and scale that was never conceivable just even 10 years ago to really fully realize the prom of nextg sequencing and the impact it can make into personalized genomics um public health screening or even a DNA forensics there has to be a change of there's a real need to overcome kind of these bottlenecks in preparing the DNA for analysis in spite of great amazing uh breakthroughs in DNA sequencing technology sample preparation has been always uh the problem to streamline this DNA sequencing workflow mainly because sample preparation is a complex labor intensive multi-step process if you're a research scientist in the laboratory it usually takes a a person a full day of really intense work to get the DNA from a blood sample from a clinical sample into a into a state or into a format that's compatible with the sequencers and these genome institutions that really have to process thousands and thousands of samples a day their approach is to have these large robot stations these liquid handlers that can pip head uh the fluids and do all the complex manipulations in kind of an automated way so what we've been able to with our technology which is called digital microfluidic Hub is to fully integrate at a microscale all the steps necessary to automate and prepare the DNA for a sequencer digital micr fluidic technology is basically a technique where you are able to move droplets around on a hydrophobically coated surface something coated with Teflon for instance um using electrodes that are patterned on that surface so you apply voltage to the electrodes and the droplets will move around uh stepwise from one electrode to the next and you can control them in a in a very discretized fashion you can actually move droplets that are on the order of uh singled digigit microl ler volumes which is very useful um in a laboratory context where you may be constrained in the size of your samples and things like that we took that paradigm and kind of re reinvented it re-engineered it um in such a way that we could readily take these systems apart and put them back together reproducibly and also provide us with options for introducing liquids into the device once it was already assembled we have a a very unique diverse team that not only has scientists involved in it but we also have mechanical electrical computer software Engineers technicians to to really bring a system like the digital microfluidic Hub together uh from a concept to an actual functional device in very short time what we want to do is we want to take the manipulation of reagents and fluids pipe adding out of uh the hands of the the field users and and automate it in a platform such as this this device very accurately locates the two glass substrat so that we can do very fine precise metering of solutions we've got very fine machine features via holes these through holes that actually bring capillaries that are the size of a human hair onto the digital microf flu device and by bringing capillaries in through that space between the two uh pieces of glass substrate we're we're able to bring Solutions on and off bring various types of reagents on and off the the device and bring them out to different uh microfluidic components in in a very organized and very Med leered a specific fashion rather than trying to get everything into a single device we're focusing on the interconnectivity where our platform our digital microfluidic Hub acts like a router it manipulates fluid as little droplets that act like cargo containers and transport the samples from different modules we offer the ability to connect subm modules that are individually optimized for their specific function using exactly the right technology for those functions um and then we provide the ability to uh interact with those subm modules at fluidic scales that are much smaller than you can do by conventional means meaning you can work at the single microl ler scale effectively and that's a particularly big Advantage when it comes to uh molecular biology where in a lot of cases you're dealing with biological materials that by their nature are very scarce and in small quantities to begin with compared to Conventional automation tools the small scale low cost and operational flexibility of the Sandia digital microfluidic Hub make it uniquely suited for a variety of demanding sample preparation and smallscale laboratory automation tasks potential applications include molecular biology automation medical Diagnostics personal genomics and Deployable analysis systems for forensics public health and environmental sampling what we've actually done done is enable an entirely new way of Performing laboratory automation nothing like this exists in the market right now there is no product you can buy that will do what our system [Music] [Music] does

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 72,352

Keywords: R&D100, Digital, Microfluidic, Hub, YouTube

Id: 9GInRQYzSJg

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2012