미세유체플랫폼 내 미세조류 배양 및 실시간 관찰 연구와 생체지질염색 방법

Abstract

In recent years, one of the most promising alternative energy resources is biomass, which can be converted to biofuel, such as biodiesel and bioethanol. Microalgae are the next generation of green-fuel since they can produce neutral lipids and hydrocarbons in large quantities

yet several challenges to the success of microalgal biofuel still exist

these include strain development, medium optimization, reactor design, metabolic engineering, and product purification. The green microalgal capability of producing materials for biofuel is depending on many environmental factors of photosynthetic eukaryotes such as light exposure, CO2, nutrient concentration, temperature and pH. Microfluidic device can serve the precise spatial and temporal control by taking advantages of the basic characteristics of laminar flow and is easy to observe single cellular behaviors. Considering these facts, we have studied microalgae to newly focus on microfluidic platform. Among several meaningful microalgal species for biofuel, much of our current research is involved with Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which is one of the model organisms. In this paper, we introduce a microfluidic platform to cultivate and observe microalgae in real-time even after staining cells vitally. We have utilized microchannels of microfluidic platform to maintain location of cells and prevent cells from being lost. As a result of the process of photolithography, the height of the channel was 5 μm and it was reasonable to the average height of C. reinhardtii cells. To estimate microalgal viability in a microfluidic platform, we observed cells after cell loading and imaging. On the conclusion, channels of microfluidic platform were effect to observe microalgal cell division or change in real-time even after vital lipid staining. We ultimately expect this microfluidic platform to bring out meaningful results from cells dedicating as microfluidic tool for the study of microalgae.