Nanoliter scale microloop reactor with rapid mixing ability for biochemical reaction

The mixing rate is a crucial factor in determining the reaction rate and product distribution in reactors for academic and industrial application. Especially, in pharmaceutical or dangerous chemistry, it is essential to create rapidly homogeneous mixture under the control of a small volume of precious sample. In this study, we propose a microloop reactor that is capable of rapid mixing for homogeneous reaction by utilizing programmable actuated microvalves (PAVs), which can generate the rotary flow rapid mixing in the reactor. The microloop reactor is composed of a stacked layered structure, which is prepared by a soft lithography method. The top layer (fluidic layer) has microchannels for supplying each reagent that is assembled with the bottom layer (control layer). The bottom layer has ultrathin polymer membrane, which can be an on-off valve to precisely control the nanoliter-scale volume of reagents in the reactor. To evaluate mixing performance, we use peroxidase reaction that produces fluorescent by-product (resorufin), thereby observing how fast they are mixed together. We quantify the uniformity of fluorescent intensity throughout the reaction loop, indicating that our proposed microloop reactor exhibits a homogeneous reaction. We envision the microreactor has potential to provide optimized microenvironments in which to perform dangerous chemistry, pharmaceuticals.