Microfluidic Chips Made With Shrinky Dinks

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 04, @03:38PM
from the improvising-science dept.

SoyChemist writes "When she started her job as a new professor at UC Merced, Michelle Khine was stuck without a clean room or semiconductor fabrication equipment, so she went MacGyver and started making Lab-on-a-Chip devices in her kitchen with Shrinky Dinks, a laser printer, and a toaster oven. She would print a negative image of the channels onto the polystyrene sheets and then shrink them with heat. The miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mold for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber."