| dc.description.abstract | Over the last few decades, droplet based microfluidics has received great attention and it is growing rapidly with interdisciplinary fields, such as biomedical, physics, chemical engineering, tissue engineering and even therapeutic area. Droplet based microfluidics offers uncountable potential in its applications ranging from a developing analytical system to precise controlling of the content inside the droplet. One of the most highlighted advantages of droplet based microfluidics is the capability of cell screening in high throughput manner, which results in significant reductions in cost and discovering new medicine or curing technology
Nowadays, culturing encapsulated cell in 3D environment has been required and performed. Although conventional 2D culturing has simplicity of platform but because 3D environment has the capability of providing high throughput biological assays and an environment similar to native biological complexes, it was chosen for this study. Furthermore, the field of biomedical or biomaterials prefer to improve that 3D environment to be much closer to genuine systems. From this respect, hydrogels have been proven and replaced as a useful platform for 3D cell culture applications in microfluidics and cell laden hydrogel droplet is one of the most popular application with their flexibility similar to natural tissue and mild gelation method. In this thesis, we studied two different types of hydrogel droplets and developed a strategy for the microbial co-culture platform from the ‘platform’ perspective. This thesis focuses on the microfabrication to pattern silicon wafer ii mold for the mass production and creating polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) devices. With this transparent hydrophobic material, hydrogel droplet generation, on-chip cross linking and manipulation could be possible. | en |
