Studies in hydrogel microfluidics and development of low cost imaging for quantitative TLC in the undergraduate teaching laboratory

Microfluidics is the micrometer-scale manipulation of small volumes of fluids, which allows the miniaturization of benchtop biological and chemical assays. Small volume analyses provide analytical and practical advantages like high precision, temporal resolution, throughput, speed, portability, and low cost and reagent consumption. Microfluidics is particularly suited to studying microscale problems, and so has been used to model biological systems like the microvasculature. Such biomimics have been produced in many ways, including 3-D printing and self-organization through various extracellular matrices. An attempt at templating a perfusable microvessel mimic through hydrogel in a microfluidic device is described in chapter 2.Thin-layer chromatography (TLC) is a simple microfluidic separation technique offering much lower cost, time requirement, and reagent consumption than other separation methods. These attributes make TLC attractive for use in point-of-care, preparatory, and pedagogical applications, and it is often used qualitatively in these ways. TLC can be quantitative as well, but generally requires expensive imaging instrumentation that can be cost-prohibitive. A simple and inexpensive quantitative TLC imaging experiment for the determination of counterfeit drugs was developed for undergraduates, and is described here in chapter 3. This imaging method was expanded for the quantitation of amino acids utilizing a cellphone camera as described in chapter 4, and future directions for the method are discussed in chapter 5.