US researchers have come up with a general strategy to integrate several biological steps in one microchip reactor.

Lab on a chip technologies are often proposed as solutions for applications ranging from performing high throughput drug discovery screening to investigating the possibilities of life on Mars. Each specific application, however, requires a slightly different system.

One approach is to develop several components, microfluidic cellular BASICs (biological application specific integrated circuits), which can be coupled together in a variety of ways to address a particular problem. The approach is analogous to that of ASICs used in development of computers or electronic systems such as mobile phones.

Luke Lee and co-workers from the University of California, Berkeley, US, have shown that two BASICs they developed previously can be integrated to achieve microfluidic cell culture and lysis.

Tanner Nevill, one of Lee's co-workers said 'We are trying to develop versatile systems that can perform many different tasks for quantitative molecular and cell biology, but can also be powerful enough to answer a specific biological question.'

'The next step would be to integrate a detection system into the chip,' Nevill explained. 'This work describes a general sample preparation chip for quantitative cell-based studies. The detection will be catered to a specific application and may look for proteins, genetic material, or other small metabolites. An example is monitoring the lysate for changes in protein expression due to exposure to drugs, which could be applied towards drug screening. This could enable automated cell toxicity screening with high accuracy and reproducibility.'

Stephen Davey