Integrated Microfluidic Device for Cell Lysis in a Continuous Flow Mode

When working with cells, the first step is often to lyse them in order to get the cellular content before analysis. Some bacteria, especially gram-positive, may be difficult to lyse with conventional lysis buffer. If the cells are not properly lysed, the quality of the analysis results might suffer. In this paper, a planar micromixer design based on a splitting and recombination (SAR) concept with ellipse-like micropillars is proposed for cell lysis. With a splitting and recombination concept, the diffusion distance of the fluids in a micromixer is decreased. Thus, space usage for micromixer of an automatic sample collection system is also minimized. The efficiency of the proposed micromixer is comparable to other conventional lysis methods. 