Facile Fabrication of Thin-Bottom Round-Well Plates Using the Deformation of PDMS Molds and Their Application for Single-Cell PCR
1
Center for Medical Sciences of St. Luke’s International University, 3-6-2, Tsukiji, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0045, Japan
2
Graduate School of Public Health and Hospital at St Luke’s International University, 9-1, Akashi-Cho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-8560, Japan
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
This author passed away on 27 October 2019.
Micromachines 2020, 11(8), 748; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi11080748
Received: 13 July 2020
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Revised: 28 July 2020
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Accepted: 29 July 2020
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Published: 31 July 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Micro and Nano Devices for Cell Analysis)
Recently, microdevices made of resins have been strongly supporting cell analysis in a range of fields, from fundamental life science research to medical applications. Many microdevices are fabricated by molding resin to a mold made precisely from rigid materials. However, because dimensional errors in the mold are also accurately printed to the products, the accuracy of the product is limited to less than the accuracy of the rigid mold. Therefore, we hypothesized that if dimensional errors could be self-corrected by elastic molds, microdevices could be facilely fabricated with precision beyond that of molds. In this paper, we report a novel processing strategy in which an elastic mold made of polymethylsiloxane (PDMS) deforms to compensate for the dimensional error on the products. By heat-press molding a polycarbonate plate using a mold that has 384 PDMS convexes with a large dimensional error of height of ± 15.6 µm in standard deviation, a 384-round-well plate with a bottom thickness 13.3 ± 2.3 µm (n = 384) was easily fabricated. Finally, single-cell observation and polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) demonstrated the application of the products made by elastic PDMS molds. Therefore, this processing method is a promising strategy for facile, low-cost, and higher precision microfabrication.
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Keywords:
polymethylsiloxane mold; elastic mold; microfabrication; heat-press; thin wall; single-cell polymerase chain reaction; multi-well plate
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MDPI and ACS Style
Yamahira, S.; Heike, Y. Facile Fabrication of Thin-Bottom Round-Well Plates Using the Deformation of PDMS Molds and Their Application for Single-Cell PCR. Micromachines 2020, 11, 748. https://doi.org/10.3390/mi11080748
AMA Style
Yamahira S, Heike Y. Facile Fabrication of Thin-Bottom Round-Well Plates Using the Deformation of PDMS Molds and Their Application for Single-Cell PCR. Micromachines. 2020; 11(8):748. https://doi.org/10.3390/mi11080748
Chicago/Turabian StyleYamahira, Shinya, and Yuji Heike. 2020. "Facile Fabrication of Thin-Bottom Round-Well Plates Using the Deformation of PDMS Molds and Their Application for Single-Cell PCR" Micromachines 11, no. 8: 748. https://doi.org/10.3390/mi11080748
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