SHF: Medium: Microbiology on a Programmable Biochip: An Integrated Hardware/Software Digital Microfluidics Platform

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The goal of this research is to develop miniaturized, low-cost, and smart microfluidic biochips that can perform "epigenetics in a drop". Such a platform will revolutionize data acquisition for molecular biology studies. The knowledge gained from applying molecular biology protocols to microfluidic biochips will facilitate the understanding of diseases such as cancer, and knowledge about epigenetic modifications in cells from inheritance will broaden the understanding of disease development. The results from this research will also be applicable to quantitative analysis protocols such as gene expression analysis. This project will foster multi-disciplinary education for engineering students and it has the potential to pave the way for new high-tech companies. This research has been structured as an interdisciplinary collaboration between investigators with complementary expertise in design automation and system architecture for microfluidics, digital microfluidics technology, and molecular biology. It will lead to an integrated 5-layer system architecture for the seamless on-chip execution of complex biochemical protocols. Breakthroughs in design automation will enable real-time decision-making based on prescribed decision criteria; such a design will allow a diverse collection of protocol paths to be traversed. Research objectives include system design and optimization methods to support quantitative analysis protocols, demonstration of biomolecular protocols on microfluidic biochips, and evaluation of design automation solutions using test cases extracted from benchtop implementation of biomolecular protocols.