High throughput oscillating-flow structure for polymerase chain reaction

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a revolutionary biomolecule technology that drives the development of bioscience. The current work reports a high throughput oscillating-flow PCR structure. In this chip, eight microchannels can simultaneously serve as PCR reaction chambers for nucleic acid sample amplification. To maximize the potential of this design, the effect of the chip structure parameter, fluid velocity, and channel spacing is simulated by finite element analysis. The thermal simulation results show that (1) when the distance between two temperature drivers is 4 mm, the width ratio is 1:3, the length of a single channel is 24 mm, the wall thickness is 3 mm (x) × 20 mm (y) × 1 mm (z), the diameter is 0.3 mm, and the fluid velocity is within 1 mm/s, two uniform temperature zones of 95 and 65 °C for the PCR process can be constructed and (2) the influence of channel spacing on temperature distribution is not significant. When the spacing is 2 mm, the relative standard deviations of the temperature for denaturation and the annealing/extension zone were 0.0706% and 0.0061%, respectively. Here, the chip sizes are 30 mm (x) × 54 mm (y) × 3 mm (z).