Prog MicroFluidics

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/biostream/

Programmable Microfluidics

Welcome! We are developing flexible microfluidic chips and high-level software libraries to enable large, complex biology experiments to be easily executed on a single platform. Please see the materials below for more details, and watch this page for future updates.News

New! General language for biology protocols presented at design-automation workshop (abstract, slides)New! Check out Micado, an AutoCAD plugin for automatic routing and GUI generation for programmable microfluidic chips (March 2008).

Publications

Towards a High-Level Programming Language for Standardizing and Automating Biology Protocols.
Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan and William Thies.
International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, July, 2009.
Abstraction Layers for Scalable Microfluidic Biocomputing.
William Thies, John Paul Urbanski, Todd Thorsen and Saman Amarasinghe.
Natural Computing, May, 2007.
Abstraction Layers for Scalable Microfluidic Biocomputers.
William Thies, John Paul Urbanski, Todd Thorsen and Saman Amarasinghe.
Proceedings of the 12th International Meeting on DNA Computing.
Seoul, Korea, June, 2006.
Digital Microfluidics Using Soft Lithography.
John Paul Urbanski, William Thies, Christopher Rhodes, Saman Amarasinghe and Todd Thorsen.
Lab on a Chip 2006, 6(1), 96-104.
Programmable Microfluidics.
William Thies, J.P. Urbanski, Mats Cooper, David Wentzlaff, Todd Thorsen, and Saman Amarasinghe.
ASPLOS Wild and Crazy Ideas Session, October, 2004.

Talks

Towards a High-Level Programming Language for Standardizing and Automating Biology Protocols. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan and William Thies.
International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, July, 2009.
Programmable Microfluidics. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
William Thies.
University of California, Berkeley, October, 2007.
Stanford University, October, 2007.
Pennsylvania State University, April, 2007.
Abstraction Layers for Scalable Microfluidic Biocomputers. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
William Thies.
12th International Meeting on DNA Computing, June, 2006.
Programmable Microfluidics Using Soft Lithography. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
John Paul Urbanski.
Qualifying Examination, January, 2006.
Programmable Microfluidics. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
William Thies.
ASPLOS Wild and Crazy Ideas Session, October, 2004.
Towards Programmable Microfluidics. (For PowerPoint, click here.)
William Thies.
Research Qualifying Examination, MIT EECS, April, 2004.

Videos

A programmable microfluidic chip in action.

Chip Operations

Transport and Storage Primitives

Mix-and-store. Using a programmable microfluidic device, two samples are loaded into a rotary mixer, mixed to homogeneity, and stored in a storage cell. In this device, samples are isolated from one another using a continuous phase (oil).

Mixing (close-up). A close-up of the rotary mixer during operation of the device. Unit-sized samples are loaded on opposite sides of the mixer, and the mixed result is transported to storage. The control software automatically derives complex mixtures using a sequence of these simple equal-proportion mixes.

Mix-and-store (alternate device). In this device, samples are separated by air rather than oil. This allows faster fluid transport, though channels must be cleaned with water between operations. Mixing is accomplished during transport of samples from a metering device to the storage cells.

Microfluidic latch. The microfluidic latch enables a fluid sample to be aligned to a given location on a microfluidic device. By partially deflecting a control valve, the latch catches an aqueous sample while allowing the background oil phase to freely pass. This enables programmability and scalability, as samples can be moved reliably from one location to another without depending on precise timing or external feedback.

Microfluidic latch (close-up). Close-up video of the microfluidic latch as decribed above. For additional details on the latch, see ourLab-on-a-Chip paper.

Storage alignment (alternate device). When samples are separated by air rather than oil, a sample can be aligned with the end of a closed storage cell by simply purging the air into the PDMS device.

50x real-time

10x real-time

50x real-time

Software

The BioStream software (described in our Lab-on-a-Chip paper) provides a high-level programming environment for designing, simulating, and executing complex biology experiments on microfluidic chips. The source code for BioStream is freely available. For a pointer to the most recent version, please send email to Bill Thies (thies@mit.edu). In the future, a release bundle will be posted on this webpage.

People

Links

thies@mit.edu

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