Week 8 - Engineering the Gut Microbiome & Microfluidics

Microfluidic Design

As part of my assignment, I decided to test out some microfluidic designs that could potentially be used within my final project. The idea is to have a petri like device that can nurture multiple colonies at a time. Each colony could have cells with different circuits and fucntions. When deployed, the device could act as a parallel to a sensor fusion chip, meaning that it can sense multiple parameters within the same device and test. This would be useful for testing different hypothesis as well as for deploying multiple environmental systems.

As part of my final project I want to see if I can make a device that could allow us to keep live cells alive outside of the lab./ For that, I'm building a little petri dish incubator. This device can control the temperature and light that a certain petri dish with a culture receives. As part of this week's assignment, I though it would be cool to allow for living modules enabled by microfluidic plates with the same form factor as petri dishes. The device is designed in a stacked modular manner that allows for different circuits and instruments to be used on the top side. We could attach sensors or communication infrastructure on top or maybe a more complex bioreactor system.

I went on to design and build the board for the device. It worked properly. I will just be needing to think of a future solution for running the peltier modules from a 3.7 Lipo battery.

I went a bit further and started building the device to test it out. Here are some stills and a nice little video.