Cell lysis is an essential primary step in cell assays. In the process of cell lysis, the cell membrane is destroyed and the substances inside the cell are extracted. By utilizing a droplet-based microfluidic platform for cell lysis, the mixer unit that is required for mixing lysis reagents with the cells can be excluded, and thus, the complexity of the fabrication process is reduced. In addition, lysing the cells within the droplets will prevent the cells from exposure to the channel walls, and as a result, cleanliness of the samples and the device is maintained. In this study, cell lysis within the droplets and the parameters affecting the efficiency of this process are investigated using a computational fluid dynamics model. Both the cell solution and the lysis reagents are encapsulated within a droplet and the lysis procedure is simulated inside the droplet. It is known that the secondary flows generated inside the droplet facilitate the mixing process. In this study, we used this effect to improve the efficiency of cell lysis in droplet and the improvement is shown to be attributed to activating an advection mechanism besides the diffusion mechanism inside the droplet. It is also shown that increasing the concentration of the lysis reagents does not have a significant effect on the efficiency of the cell lysis. The effect of the volume fraction of the lysis reagents is also studied, which is shown to be an effective factor in controlling the efficiency of the cell lysis. The lysis procedure is simulated with lysis reagent volume fractions of 50%, 66%, 80%, 90%, and 97%. The lysis efficiency is found to be 38.45%, 45.3%, 57.6%, 82.4%, and 100%, respectively, while the droplet travels through a 2 mm-long microchannel within 0.25 s. This study shows that the droplet microfluidic platform is a powerful tool for performing fast and reliable cell lysis.

中文翻译：

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研究试剂参数对液滴内细胞裂解效率的影响

细胞裂解是细胞分析中必不可少的主要步骤。在细胞裂解过程中，细胞膜被破坏，细胞内的物质被提取出来。通过利用基于液滴的微流体平台进行细胞裂解，可以排除将裂解试剂与细胞混合所需的混合器单元，从而降低制造过程的复杂性。此外，溶解液滴内的细胞将防止细胞暴露于通道壁，从而保持样品和装置的清洁度。在这项研究中，使用计算流体动力学模型研究了液滴内的细胞裂解和影响该过程效率的参数。细胞溶液和裂解试剂都封装在一个液滴中，并且在液滴内部模拟裂解过程。众所周知，液滴内部产生的二次流促进了混合过程。在这项研究中，我们利用这种效应来提高液滴中细胞裂解的效率，并且表明这种改善归因于激活了液滴内部扩散机制之外的平流机制。还表明增加裂解试剂的浓度对细胞裂解效率没有显着影响。还研究了裂解试剂的体积分数的影响，这被证明是控制细胞裂解效率的有效因素。裂解过程是用裂解试剂体积分数 50%、66%、80%、90%、和 97%。发现裂解效率分别为 38.45%、45.3%、57.6%、82.4% 和 100%，而液滴在 0.25 秒内穿过 2 毫米长的微通道。这项研究表明，液滴微流体平台是进行快速可靠的细胞裂解的有力工具。