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Developing low-cost and multiplexing electrochemical (EC) devices for bioassay is imperative. Herein, a polymer-based EC device, named EC 6-well plate, was proposed and fabricated using a non-photolithography method. Polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) was used as a substrate and laser-cut polyester (PET) film was used as a mask for patterning the electrodes. The diameter of the working electrode (WE) was 900 μ m, and each WE-modifying step only requires 1 μ l of reagent. Acrylic mold with wells (60 μ l) was bonded to the PETG substrate. Miniaturization of reference electrodes (RE) was discussed. The solid-state Ag/AgCl RE-based three-electrode system, the Au three-electrode system (3E), and Au two-electrode system (2E) were prepared and employed to develop an immunosensor for toxin B detection. Differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were applied to test the stability of the EC immunosensor. The solid-state Ag/AgCl RE-based system showed a standard deviation of open circuit potential (OCP) of 4.6 mV. The 3E system and 2E system showed the standard deviations of OCP of 0.0026 mV and 0.32 mV, respectively. It revealed that the EC 6-well plate with the 3E system is excellent for developing an EC immunosensor.
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Dynamic Adaptation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Digital Microfluidic Biochips
We describe an exciting new application domain for deep reinforcement learning (RL): droplet routing on digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs). A DMFB consists of a two-dimensional electrode array, and it manipulates droplets of liquid to automatically execute biochemical protocols for clinical chemistry. However, a major problem with DMFBs is that electrodes can degrade over time. The transportation of droplet transportation over these degraded electrodes can fail, thereby adversely impacting the integrity of the bioassay outcome. We demonstrated that the formulation of droplet transportation as an RL problem enables the training of deep neural network policies that can adapt to the underlying health conditions of electrodes and ensure reliable fluidic operations. We describe an RL-based droplet routing solution that can be used for various sizes of DMFBs. We highlight the reliable execution of an epigenetic bioassay with the RL droplet router on a fabricated DMFB. We show that the use of the RL approach on a simple micro-computer (Raspberry Pi 4) leads to acceptable performance for time-critical bioassays. We present a simulation environment based on the OpenAI Gym Interface for RL-guided droplet routing problems on DMFBs. We present results on our study of electrode degradation using fabricated DMFBs. The study supports the degradation model used in the simulator.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2313498
- PAR ID:
- 10521292
- Editor(s):
- NA
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1084-4309
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3633458
