Electrical manipulation enables high-volume fluid experiments

Microfluidics, where painstakingly-constructed networks of narrow channels and chambers guide small amounts of chemicals or biological materials into contact with each other to carry out sequences of reactions, have proved useful in testing arrays of related materials, especially in screening candidates for drug trials.

The technique, however, is notoriously temperamental so the MIT team, at the institution’s famous Media Laboratory, has developed a technique that uses electrical fields to move droplets of liquid precisely on a flat surface, mixing them together under controlled conditions.

This, they claim, could allow thousands of reactions to be carried out in parallel, and could prove more cost-effective than microfluidics while also allowing reactions to be carried out at larger scales, making the results easier to study.

"Traditional microfluidic systems use tubes, valves, and pumps," said Udayan Umapathi, who led the development of the new system. "What this means is that they are mechanical, and they break down all the time. I noticed this problem three years ago, when I was at a synthetic biology company where I built some of these microfluidic systems and mechanical machines that interact with them. I had to babysit these machines to make sure they didn't explode."