Q: How do the Microfluidic Biochips work for studying cell adhesion?
A: This product is designed to measure cell adhesion in a microfluidic environment that resembles in vivo shear stresses. The protocol involves coating the biochip with your desired cell adhesion molecule, adding endothelial cells, applying a cell suspension and subjecting the cells to a selected flow rate, then imaging your cells.
Q: What is the function of syringe pump?
A: The Microfluidic Biochips are used to study cell adhesion under specified flow rates that mimic in vivo shear stresses. The controlled flow rate can only be achieved through a microfluidic syringe pump.
Q: Which brand of syringe pump is recommended?
A: We don’t recommend a specific pump, but there are three pump manufacturers that are compatible with our Biochips: Harvard Apparatus, World Precision Instruments, and KD Scientific. Each manufacturer offers many models; you will want to select a model that does both “push” and “pull”. Some models do only one or the other.
Q: What size tubing will fit into the chip?
A: There is no physical connection of the tubing to the chip and therefore no size requirement for the tubing. The tubing is placed into a reservoir in the chip that is fairly large, so most tubing will fit. The important factor is that the syringe is able to dispense volume in µl, for example: Dispense 40 µL of media at a shear stress of 40 dynes/cm2, a shear rate of 4000 s-1, or a flow rate of 160 µL/min.
Q: How is the syringe pump fitted to the device?
A: There is technically no attachment of the chip to the syringe pump. You simply insert the connection cable from the syringe pump into the end of the channel in the chip just like it’s shown in our manual.
Q: Does the chip need to be used all at once?
A: Each chip can only be used once, so you will get two experiments with #CBA-003 or #CBA-004. We also offer a 10 chip size.