Development of an acoustofluidic-based C.elegans 3D imaging and sorting system

Project Summary Drug development has become an extremely expensive and time consuming processIt is for this reason that many efforts are being made to overhaul how potential drugs are brought to marketBy lowering the cost in the developmental and testing phasesthe inflated end costs can be controlledThe use of model organisms as a cheaper explorative method prior to human testing hasand must continue tobecome an invaluable assetOne such model organism is the small nematode speciesCaenorhabditis elegansCeleganswhich provides an excellent alternative for modeling and studying human diseases and reactionsThe Celegans genome has been completely sequenced sinceand the high number of genes and molecular pathways shared with humans makes them an excellent candidate for drug and other comparative studiesTheir transparency and short life cycle make them fast to culture and easy to analyzeThey have the added benefit of not requiring stringent animal welfare controlswhich allows for simpler testing protocolsWhile all of these benefits make them excellent candidates for studycurrent technologies have limited researchersability to take advantage of the potential that these organisms haveSpecificallythere is a need for a high throughputD imaging and sorting system that can exploit the large amount of information offered by the Celegans and is able to handle the high quantity of samples that can be prepared in a short timeframeCurrent technologies involve using either a very expensive and time intensive confocal microscope to image the animalsor a largeequally expensivebenchtop instrumentthe Union Biometrica COPAS Biosort is the only Celegans sorter on the marketto achieve sortingNeither takes full advantage of the information that the Celegans can provideeither taking too long and requiring the nematode to be paralyzed before imagingconfocal microscopyor missing critical information with their insufficient imaging capacityCOPAS BiosortThese drawbacks limit the usefulness of current Celegans analysis and sorting tools in biomedical studies and drug developmentresulting in many unmet needsOur objective in this SBIR project is to address these unmet needs by developing an acoustofluidici ethe fusion of acoustics and microfluidicsbased method that can perform high resolutionhigh throughputlow costD imaging and sorting without using confocal microscopy or requiring the Celegans to be paralyzedOur device will have the benefits of a confocal microscope concerningD imaging and the COPAS Biosort concerning high throughput Celegans sortingwhile only requiring a standard fluorescent microscopeWith unprecedentedD imaging and sorting capabilities in the same deviceour acoustofluidic approach will not only become a more compact and affordable replacement to the existing Celegans analysis and sorting approachesbut also fulfill many unmet needs in both fundamental biological biomedical research efforts as well drug development studies and toxicity testing Project Narrative Caenorhabditis elegansCelegansis an excellent organism for modeling and studying human diseases and reactionsThe proposed project is to develop tools that can effectively perform high qualityhigh throughputthree dimensional imaging and sorting of Celegans without requiring the Celegans to be paralyzedIt addresses many unmet needs in both fundamental biological biomedical research efforts as well drug development studies and toxicity testing