低温生物学应用中,筛选最佳的冻结、复温程序以及相应的保护剂配方,通常需要大量繁琐、费时且高度重复性的测试工作。将样品准备及其活性检测功能加以集成,首次在低温保存程序优化方面引入了生物芯片技术的概念。设计制作了相应的原型器件并开展实验研究。结果表明,流道式芯片用于样品分配时效果不佳,而点样式芯片则可实现快速、可靠的样品加载,红外实验进一步表明其传热一致性较好。在此基础上,利用点样式芯片与集成化的半导体制冷器件相结合,对多种生物样品的低温冷冻及复温效果进行了测试,基于对结果的比较分析可以筛选出最优的降温、复温程序及低温保护剂浓度配比。此外,还对批量测定低温保护剂溶液的热物性也进行了考察。研究表明,借助于功能集成化及检测自动化的生物芯片,可以实现大规模快速优化复杂低温保存程序。
In the practices of cryobiology, selection of an optimum freeze/thawing program and idealistic cryo-protective agent often requests rather tedious, time consuming and repetitive tests. Integrating the functions of sample preparation and viability detection, the concept of biochip technology to the field of cryopreservation, aiming to quickly find out an optimum freezing and thawing program is introuduced. The prototype devices were fabricated and the corresponding experimental tests were performed. It was shown that microflow-channel chip could not realize a high quality solution distribution. As an alternative, the spot-dropping chip provides an excellent way to load the sample quickly and reliably. Infrared thermal mapping on such a chip shows that it has a rather uniform heat transfer boundary. Applying the spot-dropping chip combined with the semiconductor cooling device, the final output of cryopreservation of multiple samples was tested, and the optimal freeze/thawing program as well as the potentially best concentration of the cryo-protective agent was found out by analyzing the results. The application of this technique to measure the thermo-physical properties of the cryo-protective agent was investigated. This study demonstrates that the biochip with integrated automatic loading and the inspection units can make it possible for massive optimization on the complex cryopreservation program to be a much quick and economic way.