Laboratory of Advanced Microfluidic Systems

 

 

 LABORATORY    
 


Our Laboratory of Advanced Microfluidic Systems is located in a shared laboratory area called Microscale Cell Engineering Laboratory in our Department. As shown in the floor plan below, we are sharing with the research team of Dr Peng Shi in the same Department of three functional rooms: (1) the tissue culture room, (2) the microfabrication room, and (3) the microscopy room. Additionally, we have an area for the general purpose research activities (highlighted in yellow).

 
  General purpose region    
 
A significant portion of our laboratory area is allocated for various research activities, e.g. simple machining, electronics, computation studies, microfluidic device fabrication, as well as the downstream cell analyses. In particular, we have electrical measurement equipment and a 3D printer for small mechanical components. Though each student has his/her office space elsewhere, we still encourage students to sit together with their works and teammates in the laboratory area, in order to maximize the communication and knowledge exchange among team members.


Figure. General purpose region (as of Jun 23, 2013).

 
  Microscopy room    
 
We equipped two inverted fluorescence microscopes in the microscopy room. One microscope (shown in the figure) has computer-controlled components including a cooled-CCD camera, a motorized stage, supply of humidified 5% CO2 in air with a defined temperature, and a pressure source manifold. This highly automated microscope has been designed for the biological microfluidic operation control. The other microscope has a cooled-CCD camera and a heat plate installed for the long-term live-cell population observation.


Figure. An automated microscopy system for high-throughput
microfluidic operations.

 
  Microfabrication room    
 


Figure. Ultra-violet aligner and hot plates.

We have also assigned a room for basic photolithography on 3-inch wafers with a minimum feature size of ~2 micron. The ultra-violet aligner can perform exposure with mask-substrate alignment. In particular, we can fabricate multilayer structures of photoresists on silicon wafers, acting as the molds for soft lithography. For more complicated microfabrication such as precise dry etching and film deposition, we can go to the microfabrication cleanroom provided by our College of Science and Engineering. 		 
  Tissue culture room    
 
We have the basic tissue culture facility. Our bio-related research mainly focuses on the human single-cell analyses. The downstream blotting and fluorescence staining on target biomolecules would be our typical analysis tools.

Figure. Tissue culture room.
 

 

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Laboratory of Advanced Microfluidic Systems | Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering | City University of Hong Kong
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