UCT Specialty Chemical Cited in Microalgae Study
Microalgae are promising alternatives to petroleum as renewable biofuel sources, however not sufficiently economically competitive yet.
In a recent paper published in Lab On A Chip ((2019) 19 4128) authored by Song-I Han et al., UCT’s specialty chemical tridecafluoro-1,1,2,2- tetrahydrooctyl-1-trichlorosilane was used as an integral part of a microalgae study. In this study, the UCT’s specialty chemical was employed to facilitate PDMS replication, followed by PDMS microchannel replication. After oxygen plasma treatment of both the electrode-patterned glass substrate and the PDMS replica, they were aligned and bonded together for 24 h at 80 °C.
This study presents a lateral DEP-based microfluidic sorting platform that allows for 1) providing digital quantification of the intracellular lipid level of a given microalgal cell population, 2) selecting cells/strains that show enhanced lipid production, and 3) enriching a given population to have more high-lipid-producing cells.
In summary, the developed platform can be exploited to quickly quantify microalgae lipid distribution in a given population in real-time and label-free, as well as to enrich a cell population with high-lipid-producing cells, or to select high-lipid-accumulating microalgal variants from a microalgal library. UCT’s specialty chemicals provide scientists with the finest of materials for their investigations. For more information about UCT specialty chemicals, visit https://www.unitedchem.com/product-category/silane/
