Biochemical IC chip for pretreatment in biochemical experiments

The world's first micro ultrasonic homogenizer chip, a new type of biochemical IC chip, is proposed and developed successfully. The homogenizer chip utilizes ultrasonic cavitation to disrupt cells. Both a piezoelectric element and an exponential horn to generate ultrasonic cavitation are hybridized in the chip by using our original microstereolithography technique named "hybrid-IH process". We succeeded to disrupt cells (PC 12) within only 3 seconds by using this chip. The efficiency of cell homogenization was almost 100%. The proteins extracted from PC 12 cells were separated and detected by using SDS gel-electrophoresis and silver staining. The micro homogenizer chip is useful for pretreatment of various biochemical and biological analyses in microscale.