Guest Seminar - From Principle to Practice: SlipChip Microfluidic Systems for Biological Research and Clinical Diagnostics

The SlipChip is a microfluidic device that can produce a large number of nanoliter and sub-nanoliter droplets with simple loading and slipping operations.  It contains micro-wells and micro-ducts on the contacting surfaces of two microfluidic plates. By moving one plate against the other, micro-features on different plates can form continuous fluidic paths or discrete reaction compartments. No cumbersome manual manipulation or complex control instrument is required. Different designs of the SlipChip devices have been previously demonstrated for digital PCR, digital RPA, and digital LAMP for quantitative analysis of Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, HIV, HBV, and HCV. A multivolume SlipChip and a serial dilution SlipChip were also demonstrated for nucleic acid quantification over a large dynamic range. A parallel multistep digital analysis SlipChip microfluidic device can perform further parallel manipulation of reaction partitions to achieve “divide, manipulate, and analyze” capabilities, demonstrated with a two-step digital LAMP-CRISPR for SARS-CoV2. SlipChip devices have also been applied for rapid high-throughput phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST), single cell analysis, microparticle fabrication, and digital protein analysis. In practice, these SlipChip methods have great potential for both biological research and clinical diagnostics.