Design And Fabrication Of Cell Culture Chip For A Bionic Stable Microenvironment

Cell culture in vitro is an important part of cell research. Microfluidic chip can accurately imitate the microenvironment in vivo through the fluid control in the microchannel networks. And it has been an important platform for cell research. The microenvironment in the chip has a critical effect on cell growth. Cell culture medium and drug solution need to be injected into the cavity of the microfluidic chips for cell experiments. However, the microenvironment will be changed by the disturbance in the external stream during the operations of cell culture, drug analysis and intercellular analysis, so that the results of further drugs analysis will be influenced. So, it is important to design a microfluidic chip to resist external disturbance. Therefore, following research was carried out in the paper.(1). The transport process of water in dicotyledonous networks was studied. There are network structures in dicotyledonous, and the water transport system follows Murray's law. Because of the existence of areole, the concentration and pressure is uniform and the flow rate is stable in the microenvironment that mesophyll cells grow.Mesophyll cells live in the areole structures surrounded by veinlets. Water and salts provide nutrients for the surrounding cells through the pits on the sidewalls of the vessels of the areole structures. When there are hurts and traffic fluctuations in the vessels, the ability that against external disturbances is related to the shape of areoles. In the paper, the shapes of the areoles were changed by changing the number of areoles. When the number of sides of areoles increases, vein loopiness increases, and the ability that against external disturbances increases, too. When n=8, the ability that veins resist the flow fluctuations in the vessels achieves the strongest.(2). The bionic microfluidic chips were designed and fabricated. There are three layers of the bionic chip, which are fluid channel layer, cover layer and cell injection layer. Based on the characteristics of water transport redundancy in dicotyledonous networks and the requirements of cell culture in vitro, five different shapes of cell culture chamber were designed, and shapes were square, regular pentagon, regular hexagon, regular heptagon and regular octagon. Numerical simulation was done for the microflow field in the cell culture chamber, and it is proved that microfluid in the bionic structure model has a small and uniform liquid flow rate, and can effectively resist the external flow disturbances. The bionic chips were fabricated using MEMS technology.(3). A method of particle velocity measurement was used to analyze the kinematics of the microfluid in the culture chamber. Select polystyrene microspheres as the tracer particles, measure the velocity and study the velocity distribution of the microfluid in the simple single-channel and bionic chips. Adjust the inlet velocity perturbation to imitate external disturbance, and study the kinematics and the effect of external disturbances on the microenvironment in different shapes of culture chambers, to optimize the shape of the chamber. PC 12 cells were cultured in the traditional flakes and optimized bionic cell culture chamber, and the growth of cells was observed through an inverted microscope to verify the function of the chip.