UC San Diego

Microfluidics has shown tremendous development in the past years because of its applications in biological and chemical research. Microfluidic devices can be easily and inexpensively fabricated through rapid phototyping and soft lithography with silicone elastomer. Microchannels allow laminar flow and diffusion. With these properties, flow behavior can be predicted accurately and controlled precisely. Thus, microchannels allow new functionalities that are unavailable on macrochannels. Microfluidic chemostat has been designed and studied,1,21 and it is able to maintain chemostatic condition and without flushing the cells out. In this thesis, the hydrogel is used as the main function area of the microfluidic device to easily maintain the chemostatic condition for the cell growth and keep the cells from escaping at the same time, which could be utilized as the device to study the response of bacterial cells to mechanical forces