Superior Optical Performance: Quartz glass exhibits extremely high light transmittance across the ultraviolet to infrared wavelength ranges, ensuring the accuracy and clarity of optical detection during cell counting. This helps obtain high-quality cell images for observation and analysis.
Strong Chemical Stability: Quartz glass is resistant to acid and alkali corrosion, making it less likely to react with chemical substances such as cell culture media and staining agents. This maintains the structural and functional stability of the chip during cell counting, ensuring reliable results.
Good Thermal Stability: It can withstand a certain range of temperature changes, adapting to different temperature conditions in cell culture and counting (e.g., suitable culture temperatures or heating/cooling operations). It is less prone to deformation or cracking due to temperature variations, ensuring normal chip use.
High Surface Flatness: Quartz glass can be precisely processed to achieve excellent surface flatness, which is critical for microfluidic chips in cell counting chambers. A smooth surface facilitates uniform cell distribution and adhesion, while also ensuring smooth fluid flow in microchannels, reducing resistance and interference to improve counting accuracy.
Good Biocompatibility: It has no significant adverse effects on cell growth and metabolism, neither inhibiting cell proliferation nor causing mutations. This provides a favorable environment for cells, making the counting and related experiments on the chip closer to the real in-vivo state of cells.
Working Principle
Microchannel Design: The chip features a network of microscale channels. Cell suspensions flow through these microchannels, and by controlling the size, shape, and layout of the channels, cells can be orderly arranged and passed through individually, enabling single-cell counting.
Optical Detection: Combined with optical detection technologies (e.g., fluorescence microscopy, phase-contrast microscopy), the excellent optical properties of quartz glass are used to observe and image cells in microchannels. Cells can be identified and classified based on characteristics such as morphology, size, and fluorescence signals for counting.
Fluid Control: External fluid control systems (e.g., micropumps, valves) precisely regulate the flow rate, volume, and direction of cell suspensions in the microfluidic chip. This ensures uniform cell distribution in microchannels and sequential passage through the counting area, avoiding cell aggregation and overlap to enhance counting accuracy.
Application Fields
Biomedical Research: Used in cell biology, oncology, immunology, etc., for counting and analyzing various cells (e.g., detecting cancer cell proliferation or studying changes in immune cell numbers), helping to deeply understand cellular physiological and pathological processes.
Drug Development: In drug screening and efficacy evaluation, it monitors changes in cell quantity and activity under drug action, rapidly assessing the effects of drugs on cell growth, proliferation, and apoptosis to provide important experimental data for drug research.
Clinical Diagnosis: For example, in the diagnosis of blood diseases, it accurately counts and classifies blood cells; in infectious disease detection, it counts and analyzes pathogen-infected cells, assisting doctors in diagnosis and treatment planning.
Manufacturing Processes
Lithography: The designed microchannel patterns are transferred onto the quartz glass surface via lithography. Ultraviolet light irradiates the photoresist to trigger a photochemical reaction, followed by development and other steps to form precise microchannel patterns on the glass.
Etching: Etching processes (e.g., wet etching or dry etching) are used to remove unnecessary parts of the quartz glass surface, creating microchannels with required depth and width. The etching rate and time must be precisely controlled to ensure dimensional accuracy and surface quality of the channels.
Bonding: The etched quartz glass wafer with microchannels is bonded to another quartz glass wafer or a cover plate of other materials to form a closed microfluidic chip. Bonding methods include thermal bonding and anodic bonding, which use high temperature, pressure, or electric fields to create strong chemical bonds between the two glass pieces, ensuring the tightness and stability of the microchannels.
