Publications related to Multiscale Porosity Microfluidics to Study Bacterial Transport in Heterogeneous Chemical Landscapes

Improved microfluidic transcriptome based screening methods

Christoph Merten, Leonie Kolmar, Xiaoli Ma, Hongxing Hu

The invention provides microfluidic screening systems for the identification of compounds or compositions influencing cellular transcriptomes. The invention is predicated upon taking into account differences in newly synthesized mRNA in contrast to so call ...

2024

Water weakening and the compressive brittle strength of carbonates: Influence of fracture toughness and static friction

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Barnaby Padraig Fryer, Corentin Jean-Marie Rémi Noël

Water is ubiquitous within the pore space of rocks and has been shown to affect their physical and mechanical behaviour. Indeed, water can act on the rock strength via mechanical (i.e., reducing the effective stresses) or chemical effects (e.g., mineral di ...

2024

Modified capillary number to standardize droplet generation in suction-driven microfluidics

Jatin Panwar, Rahul Roy

In droplet microfluidic devices with suction-based flow control, the microchannel geometry and suction pressure at the outlet govern the dynamic properties of the two phases that influence the droplet generation. Therefore, it is critical to understand the ...

Springer Heidelberg2024

Microfluidic systems for infectious disease diagnostics

Thomas Lehnert, Martinus Gijs

Microorganisms, encompassing both uni- and multicellular entities, exhibit remarkable diversity as omnipresent life forms in nature. They play a pivotal role by supplying essential components for sustaining biological processes across diverse ecosystems, i ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Impact of CO2-rich seawater injection on the flow properties of basalts

Lyesse Laloui, Eleni Stavropoulou, Cesare Griner

Permanent CO storage in basalts through mineralisation offers a promising solution for reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. This study focuses on the impact of potential mineralisation on the flow properties of the basaltic material. Fl ...

2024

Crystal, defect, and morphology engineering of porous two-dimensional materials for ionic separation

Heng-Yu Chi

Ordered two-dimensional (2D) materials hosting Å-scale pores are highly promising for enabling challenging separation, thanks to well-defined pore geometry resulting in tight confinement of ions when hosted inside the pore. In addition, the 2D nature of th ...

EPFL2024

High-resolution imaging and analysis of the intestinal bacterial load of Caenorhabditis elegans during early adulthood

Martinus Gijs, Farzad Rezaeianaran

We study the presence within the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) of a fluorescent strain of the worm's bacterial food (Escherichia coli (E. coli) OP50) during early adulthood. Use of a microfluidic chip based on a thin glass coverslip substrate al ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Development of next-generation microfluidic systems for enhanced, faster, and cost-effective immunoassays for tissue diagnostics - Ac electrothermal flow & Acoustofluidics

Muaz Salama Abdelmonem Draz

The application of microfluidics in the field of surface-based assays and more specifically, the spatial molecular profiling of tumor tissues has gained a lot of interest, especially with the increased interest in personalized medicine and targeted therapy ...

EPFL2023

Microfluidic devices for automated analysis of ingested bacteria in the Caenorhabditis elegans intestine

Farzad Rezaeianaran

In this thesis, we explored on-chip high-resolution imaging of the fate of intestinal bacteria and bacterial products in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). In the first part, we carried out high-resolution z-stack fluorescent imaging of Red Fluorescent P ...

EPFL2023

Influence of pore-scale heterogeneity on the precipitation patterns in Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP)

Ariadni Elmaloglou

The principle of tailoring material properties to improve the mechanical behaviour of soils through compaction or cement grouting dates to the 60s. The increasing trends of urbanization worldwide require new solutions for the development of resilient and s ...

EPFL2023

Microfluidic devices

Matthias Lütolf, Jisoo Park

The present disclosure relates to a microfluidic device comprising: a substrate; a culture chamber (130); a loading channel (170) in fluid communication with the culture chamber; at least one auxiliar channel (170-1, 5 170-2) extending from and in fluid co ...

2023

Efficient AC electrothermal flow (ACET) on-chip for enhanced immunoassays

Martinus Gijs, Diego Gabriel Dupouy, Muaz Salama Abdelmonem Draz

Biochemical reaction rates in microfluidic systems are known to be limited by the diffusional transport of reagents, leading often to lowered sensitivity and/or longer detection times in immunoassays. Several methods, including electrically powering electr ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Bacterial colonization in realistic environments: how mechanics impact biofilm formation in the wild and during infection

Tamara Rossy

A variety of physical inputs acts onto bacteria in nature. However, these are most often ignored in the studies of their physiology. There is now increasing evidence indicating that bacteria respond to physical stimuli, including mechanical forces. Yet, qu ...

EPFL2023

Acoustofluidic large-scale mixing for enhanced microfluidic immunostaining for tissue diagnostics

Martinus Gijs, Diego Gabriel Dupouy, Muaz Salama Abdelmonem Draz

The usage of microfluidics for automated and fast immunoassays has gained a lot of interest in the last decades. This integration comes with certain challenges, like the reconciliation of laminar flow patterns of micro-scale systems with diffusion-limited ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Electronic readout of DNA amplification in nanoliter chambers. Strategies towards highly parallel semiconductor-based nucleic acid amplification testing

Saurabh Tomar

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been the most significant driver in the field of nucleic acid testing (NAT) since its invention. Popularized as an abbreviation by the Covid-19 pandemic, PCR-based methods are the gold standard in the field of diagnostic ...

EPFL2023

Combination of dielectrophoretic and hydrodynamic traps for the controlled contact between cells or beads and application to adhesion assays

Clémentine Sophie Sarah Lipp

Multicellular organisms require very well organized and finely balanced cell-cell communication, adhesion and coordination to ensure the organisms homeostasis. These functions rely on specialized receptors placed at the cells membrane whose binding to thei ...

EPFL2023

Portable impedance-sensing device for microorganism characterization in the field

Sandro Carrara, Karim Bouzid

A variety of biosensors have been proposed to quickly detect and measure the properties of individual microorganisms among heterogeneous populations, but challenges related to cost, portability, stability, sensitivity, and power consumption limit their app ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Hydrogel-Encased Photonic Microspheres with Enhanced Color Saturation and High Suspension Stability

Esther Amstad

Regular arrays of colloidal particles can produce striking structural colors without the need for any chemical pigments. Regular arrays of colloidal particles can be processed into microparticles via emulsion templates for use as structural colorants. Phot ...

Amer Chemical Soc2023

Microfluidic device for sample encapsulation and method for operation thereof

Philippe Renaud, Jiande Zhou

The invention relates to a microfluidic device (3) comprising: - an inlet channel (31) having an inlet configured to be operatively connected with a droplet source (2) wherein the inlet channel (31) has a width wi and height hi; and - an outlet channel wit ...

2023

Dendrimer-Based Coatings on a Photonic Crystal Surface for Ultra-Sensitive Small Molecule Detection

Serguei Sekatski

We propose and demonstrate dendrimer-based coatings for a sensitive biochip surface that enhance the high-performance sorption of small molecules (i.e., biomolecules with low molecular weights) and the sensitivity of a label-free, real-time photonic crysta ...

MDPI2023