A Novel Approach towards Biochemical Synthesis on Cyberphysical Digital Microfluidic Biochip

Digital Microfluidic Biochip (DMFB) consists of Two-Dimensional (2-D) microarrays that can perform many diagnostic tests simultaneously. DMFB's are expected to be combined with cyberphysical systems in near future. Thus faster and error-free synthesis techniques need to be implemented on such chips. Synthesis of various bio-protocols is generally performed based on various mixing modules present on the chip. In this work, the concept of such dedicated virtual modules has been eliminated and a novel Module-Less-Synthesis (MLS) method is proposed for accomplishing bioassays in cyber physical DMFB. We have proposed different directional-shifts (movements) of droplet and computed the percentage of mixing accomplishment for each directional-shift of the droplet. We have also identified various shift-patterns (movements) to accomplish entire mixing in lesser time compared to earlier synthesis methods and also include an error recovery approach for cyberphysical DMFB. Experimental results on real life bioassay like PCR and on synthetic benchmark show improved synthesis performance with bioassay completion time (t(max)) significantly reduced from earlier module-based synthesis techniques.