December 2007
Bioengineering Ph.D. alumna Michelle Khine, currently Assistant Professor of Engineering at UC Merced, has pioneered a creative way to make microfluidic patterns using Shrinky-Dinks – the shrinking plastic craft toys of the 1970’s.
Khine and her team designed complicated patterns in Auto CAD, printed them onto Shrinky Dinks, and then heated the plastic toys in an inexpensive oven. As the sheets became smaller, the lines of print would bulge out. Taller and more pronounced, the miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber.
In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Microfluidic devices are becoming common in biological research, and the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.
Other researchers on this team included Anthony Grimes, Bioengineering grad student David N. Breslauer, Maureen Long, Jonathan Pegan, and Bioengineering professor Luke P. Lee.
Read the story at Wired Science or the published article at Lab on a Chip .