Liquid polystyrene: a room-temperature photocurable soft lithography compatible pour-and-cure-type polystyrene
Liquid polystyrene: a room-temperature photocurable soft lithography compatible pour-and-cure-type polystyrene
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DOI：
10.1039/c4lc00045e
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发表时间：
2014-08-07
期刊：
影响因子：
6.1
通讯作者：
Rapp, Bastian E.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Nargang, Tobias M.;Brockmann, Lara;Rapp, Bastian E.
材料在微流体中很重要。自从引入软光刻作为原型技术和聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）作为选择材料以来，微流体社区几乎完全使用这种材料。然而，对于许多应用，PDMS不是理想的材料，因为其有限的耐溶剂性和疏水性使得其对于某些基于细胞的测定特别不利。对于这些应用，聚苯乙烯（PS）将是更好的选择。PS已用于生物学研究和分析数十年，并已开发和优化了许多协议。然而，PS尚未在微流体中广泛使用，主要是因为作为热塑性材料，它通常使用工业聚合物复制技术进行结构化。这使得PS不适合原型制作。在本文中，我们介绍了一种新的结构化方法，PS是兼容的软光刻原型。我们开发了一种液体PS预聚物，我们称之为“液体聚苯乙烯”（liqPS）。ligPS是粘性自由流动的液体，其可以通过使用软复制模板的可见光曝光来固化，例如，由PDMS制成。在PS中使用liqPS对微流体系统进行原型设计与在PDMS中对微流体系统进行原型设计一样简单。我们证明固化liqPS是（化学和物理）相同的商业PS。对小鼠成纤维细胞L929的比较研究表明，在这样的实验中，liqPS不能与商业PS区分开。研究人员可以使用liqPS和软光刻来开发和优化微结构。一旦该设备将被商业化，它可以使用可扩展的工业聚合物复制技术在PS中制造-材料在两种情况下是相同的。因此，tiqPS通过提供一种通用材料，有效地弥合了“微流体原型”和“工业微流体”之间的差距。
Materials matter in microfluidics. Since the introduction of soft lithography as a prototyping technique and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as material of choice the microfluidics community has settled with using this material almost exclusively. However, for many applications PDMS is not an ideal material given its limited solvent resistance and hydrophobicity which makes it especially disadvantageous for certain cell-based assays. For these applications polystyrene (PS) would be a better choice. PS has been used in biology research and analytics for decades and numerous protocols have been developed and optimized for it. However, PS has not found widespread use in microfluidics mainly because, being a thermoplastic material, it is typically structured using industrial polymer replication techniques. This makes PS unsuitable for prototyping. In this paper, we introduce a new structuring method for PS which is compatible with soft lithography prototyping. We develop a liquid PS prepolymer which we term as "Liquid Polystyrene" (liqPS). ligPS is a viscous free-flowing liquid which can be cured by visible light exposure using soft replication templates, e.g., made from PDMS. Using liqPS prototyping microfluidic systems in PS is as easy as prototyping microftuidic systems in PDMS. We demonstrate that cured liqPS is (chemically and physically) identical to commercial PS. Comparative studies on mouse fibroblasts L929 showed that liqPS cannot be distinguished from commercial PS in such experiments. Researchers can develop and optimize microftuidic structures using liqPS and soft lithography. Once the device is to be commercialized it can be manufactured using scalable industrial polymer replication techniques in PS - the material is the same in both cases. Therefore, tiqPS effectively closes the gap between "microfluidic prototyping" and "industrial microfluidics" by providing a common material.