Concept of a microfluidics and tunneling effect-based BioMEMS to detect cells

Abstract

A new concept of Biological Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (BioMEMS) based on tunneling effect and microfluidics to detect cell is proposed in this paper. It is multilayer structure, one layer is microfluidics and another is tunneling effect-based biosensor. And its key sizes refer to the cell size that will be detected, such as hepatocyte. The crucial material of the BioMEMS is PDMS. The electrokinetic method used to manipulate the cell in microchannel and three main factors (the effective weight of cell, the fluid static pressure and the fluid dynamic pressure) affecting the deformation of membrane have been analyzed and simulated using Ansys® software. The maximum deformation is -0.31 nm resulting from the effective weight of hepatocyte in the Z direction when the thickness of membrane is 70 nm (PDMS: 60 nm, Au: 10 nm). At the same condition, the deformations approximate to zero resulting from the fluid static pressure and dynamic pressure. The results prove that the main detection information is from the detected cell and the structure is feasible. This will be a more sensitive and original BioMEMS. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.