Lab-on-a-Display: Microparticles Manipulation using Liquid Crystal Display

We report a new microfluidic system, `lab-on-a-display', that microparticles can be manipulated by dielectrophoretic forces generated from the optoelectronic tweezers (OET) on a liquid crystal display (LCD). In this study, the lab-on-a-display is first realized by a conventional LCD module and an OET device including a ground layer, a liquid layer containing microparticles, and a photoconductive layer. When an AC bias voltage is applied between the photoconductive and the ground layers, the LCD makes an image and transmits it to the OET device. Consequently, the image forms virtual electrodes on the surface of photoconductive layer, which results in the electric field gradient to generate a dielectrophoretic force. The lab-on-a-display is successfully applied to the programmable manipulation of 45 μm polystyrene particles. Our lab-on-a-display platform may be potential for programmable particle manipulation or a bioprocessing unit including a cell separator and a bead-based immunoassay.