| Summary: | 碩士 === 義守大學 === 機械與自動化工程學系碩士班 === 98 === Currently, cell culture systems play an important role for the evaluation of drugs and the diseases detection. Traditionally, cell culturing is a labour-intensive process that requires several hours of repetitive routine work. The manipulators must be well-disciplined in whole cell culturing process including cell growth, harvesting, reseeding and analysis. In order to maintain viable and consistent cell lines, cell culturing also requires to carefully control the environmental condition such as the temperature of incubator, concentration of carbon dioxide, pH value of medium, etc. Hence, the automated cell culture systems have been introduced to improve the consistency of the cell culturing process and reducing the operating error made by human intervention. Besides, the miniaturization of the culture platform contributes favorably to a lower chemical and temperature gradient culture environment and reduces the waste of experiment resources.
In this study, we will develop a new continuous cell culture platform by using micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) technologies. The fundamental microfluidics is facilitated to design the optimum system. The cell culture system is comprised of pumps,valves, a mixer, heaters, a temperature sensor, a cell culture area and several reservoirs on a chip. The automatic delivery system, i.e., the micropump and microvalves, will be intended to achieve a lower as well as a uniform flow to avoid a sharper shear stress to damage the culturing cells. Meanwhile, the design of muti-microchannel with normal closed valves can delivery different liquids respectively and lower the chances of inter-contamination. Additionally, the mixer was designed to not only perform a higher mixing efficiency to reduce the chemical gradient, but also to exhibit a temperature uniformity to decrease the temperature gradient. In the study, microheaters will be fabricated by ITO glass by using the commercial screen-printing technology. Indium tin oxide is a transparent conducting thin film that has a highly visible transmission and low resistivity. It can be both heated the cell-culture area and be obtained a higher resolution observation. Finally, the new cell culture platform will provide a satisfactory, steady and automatic cell culture environment outside of an incubator,but also a system fitting high-resolution observation. This development of the automatic cell culture system will assure us to have a powerful tool to evaluate drugs and detect diseases in an efficient and fast way.
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