Chip for genomic integrity 2018

Goals

As many steps of the comet cell assay should be carried out on the chip.

• Concentration of the cells by centrifugation
• Creation of the agarose pads
• Treatment of the agarose pads
• Electrophoresis
• Analyse of the agarose pads

The chip should be easy to produce (either considering the materials we use or the machinery). It should be reusable. As the chip's users won't be used to work in a lab, the chip will need to be easy to use and handle.

Design

We decided to make the chip the size of a microscope slide (25mm height, 75mm long), in order for it to be easily observable under a normal microscope. We will make various slides, which will need to be changed according to the step.

Creation of the agarose pads

For this first step, we thought about using 3 slides. A top one, a middle one and a bottom one.

• The top one will contain 6 holes, 2 for each pad (entry and exit hole if overflow)
• The middle one will be thin (if possible 50 or 100 U+00B5

Challenges & Problems

• The chip does not for the moment enable the concentration of the cells into a small volume. We do perform two centrifugations in the lab, we have to see if just letting the cells settle down by gravity would be sufficient
• The chip slide would be easily observable under a microscope, but maybe more challenging to do a slide observable with a DIY microscope (like a foldscope).