Moreover, the temperature environment plays a critical role in a cell culture. It has been reported that the thermal environment in a cell culture system could have significant Erlotinib HCl impacts on cell physiology [17,18]. In a general animal cell culture, the temperature (e.g., 37 ��C) is normally maintained by the use of commercial cell culture incubators. In an incubator setup, the microscopic observations or other online monitoring activities of cell culture are quite demanding, and thus complicate the Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries experimental Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries operations. Also, traditional cell incubators are commonly bulky and are not readily compatible with the experimental setup for perfusion cell culture, in which interconnections between the medium feeding tubing with the external medium pumping equipment are normally required.
These technical hurdles suggest Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries a crucial need for a smart thermal control device, compatible Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries with microfluidic perfusion cell culture operations. With the help of microfabrication technology, various microheaters have been proposed, mainly for micro-scale polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [19], cell lysis [20], or cell culture [21]. Nevertheless, most of the published micro-scale heating devices were fabricated by the technique of evaporation deposition of a metal thin film (e.g., platinum (Pt) or gold (Au)) on a substrate, which is normally complicated and costly to fabricate. Most importantly, the optical transparency of the resulting microheaters is greatly affected by the fabrication process, or the choice of material. This could hinder their application for integrating into a microfluidic perfusion cell culture system for real-time cellular imaging.
To tackle the aforementioned technical Batimastat hurdles, an integrated microfluidic perfusion cell culture system for real-time microscopic observation of biological cells was proposed. One of the key features of the system is the incorporation of a simple pneumatically-driven micropump coupled with a normally-closed valve for backflow-free medium perfusion in the cell culture chip. Another distinctive feature is the integration of a transparent indium tin oxide (ITO) glass-based microheater chip in the system [22], enabling the creation of stable and uniform thermal conditions in the cell culture chamber. By combining these characteristics, not only does the integrated system provide stable and uniform cell culture conditions, but it also holds great promise for real-time microscopic observation of biological cells.
In this study, an integrated system comprising a microfluidic perfusion cell culture chip module, and an ITO-glass microheater chip module was designed, fabricated, and evaluated in terms of its performance. Briefly, the proposed medium pumping mechanism was demonstrated to be able to perform continuous medium perfusion license with Pfizer with a flow rate range of 15.4 to 120.0 ��L?min?1.