IR thermocycler for centrifugal microfluidic platform with direct on-disk wireless temperature measurement system

Abstract:
We present a novel infrared (IR) thermocycler for centrifugal microfluidic platforms. It allows to directly heat liquids in reaction containers within microfluidic polymer film disks for polymerase chain reactions (PCR) with average heating gradients of up to 4 K/s. This thermocycler mainly consists of an IR ring-heater, a direct ondisk wireless temperature measurement system with a resolution of 0.1 K and an embedded adaptive PID controller. That enables to precisely control the temperature of the liquid even at variant conditions e.g. manufacturing tolerances, different cavity locations, ambient temperature changes, whereas state-of-the-art thermocyclers with indirect air temperature measurement are inflexible due to static thermal energy flow models. Hence our system has the potential for a higher efficiency, accuracy and robustness, thus for a better PCR reproducibility.