Reactant Cost Minimization through Target Concentration Selection on Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Nowadays, lab-on-a-chip is one of the most sophisticated technologies, while sample preparation, one of the essential steps in bioassays, is the process that mixes buffer and reactant to achieve the desired target concentration. Since the reactant consumption generally takes a notable part of the total cost in a bioassay, minimizing its usage is generally preferable. Existing techniques only consider one fixed target concentration, whereas a range of values is acceptable in real applications. In this paper, we propose two algorithms that can select a feasible concentration value within a given range for cost minimization. Experimental results show that the proposed methods can further reduce the reactant cost up to 20%.