Analysis of Concentration Errors in Sample Dilution Algorithms on a Digital Microfluidic Biochip

摘要

Sample preparation is an important step in any biochemical protocol, and several algorithms are known for automating them on a digital microfluidic (DMF) lab-on-a-chip (LoC). On-chip dilution of a sample on a DMF biochip involves several mix-split steps, which often suffer from the inaccuracies caused by unbalanced splitting of micro-fluid droplets. Also, error minimization is essential because of the limited availability of the stock solutions and costly reagents. In this work, we analyze the performance of two dilution algorithms Min-Mix (Thies et al., 2008) and DMRW (Roy et al., 2010) in the presence of volumetric errors that may occur during the splitting process. Our analysis exposes many interesting error behaviors and indicates possible solutions to correct them in a cyber-physical microfluidic platform.