Self-Digitization Microfluidic Device for Digital PCR

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This SBIR Phase I project will determine the feasibility of using Self-Digitization (SD) microfluidic technology as a commercially competitive nucleic acid quantification (NAQ) platform. Quantification of nucleic acids(both DNA and RNA) is utilized in various fields including general research, biomedical research, and clinical diagnostics, with specific applications in areas such as measuring gene expression levels, disease diagnostics including pathogen/viral load monitoring, cancer diagnostics, and more. Self-Digitization is a simple, robust technology that efficiently uses a network of channels and wells to spontaneously partition samples into an array of predefined well volumes. This platform is ideally suited for digital PCR (dPCR) applications. Digital PCR works by partitioning samples into thousands or even millions of individual volumes where each volume may or may not contain target DNA. Only volumes with target DNA give a positive signal resulting in a di