Microfluidic Art

This started out as a fun way to display a new technique I developed to pattern proteins onto substrates. This technique allows for filling extremeley long microfluidic channels with solutions in a very facile manner. I had an excellent undergraduate student working with me, Austin Day, and I asked him to design a microfludic chip that looked cool. He came back a few days later with an autocad drawing of the UC Berkeley Campanile, that completely blew me away! The pictures below are actual images of a microfluidic device filled with dye. Of note are the channel dimensions which are around 20 microns in width, and 5 microns in height. The chip has 6 inputs, and zero outputs - that means that all of the channels are dead-ends, which is meant to illustrate the power of this technique!

This amazing image created by Austin inspired me to expand on the idea of 'microfluidic art.' Austin has moved into another lab, but I have another undergraduate, Albert Mach, who is helping me with this. Albert is developing a way to preserve this 'art' for extended time periods. It's common practice for microfluidicists to fill their devices with dye to take pictures. This works well, but only lasts for a few days because the dye dries up. Even if you somehow cap the inputs and outputs, the dye rarely lasts longer than a couple of days, especially in PDMS because it is permeable to air.

Here is brand new piece, created by Albert Mach. Check back soon for some more pictures - Albert and I are working on some more cool images. Also, if anyone is interested in submitting artwork for this project, please let me know.

Albert did it! With a bunch of time and effort by Albert, we have figured out how to make permanent microfluidic art. This obviously has applications for pieces like this, but the techniques we have developed can also be used by researchers to preserve devices for display and showcasing. We intend to publish the detailed methods of our procedure soon. Until then, feel free to email with questions.

This piece is already several months old, and it shows no sign of degradation.