Abstract
This study reports the completion of fundamental fluidic operation considered essential to build digital microfluidic system, which can be used for micro total analysis system (μTAS) or lab-on-a-chip (LOC) by using electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) actuations on coplanar electrodes with no cover plate. By arranging driving and reference electrodes on one plate, such an EWOD configuration can accommodate more sensing mechanisms from the top, which allows increasing flexibility for system development. Droplet actuation on an open surface with removed top plate is demonstrated, that was shown additional flexibility for the system design. Repeatable transport and mix of microdroplets among DNA, enzyme, PBS and multi-salt reaction buffer to ligate DNA fragment with vector was shown, to establish the compatibility of these fluids with single plate configuration, i.e. no cover plate. The droplet-manipulation devices is also demonstrated the successful moving, cutting, merging, and creating of droplets in a parallel-plate configuration, i.e. between the driving plat with coplanar electrodes and the other plate with no electrode. Based on the results, single plate configuration EWOD chip could be a novel tool to delivery many kinds of biosamples, such as DNA, enzyme, and salt solution without problem. In this study, we present a success biomolecular ligation procedure by using single plate configuration EWOD chip. The results was shown that single plate configuration EWOD chip can be good enough in the ligation process and the efficiency of ligation was comparable with the one by the conventional practice of pipette.