A novel integrated microfluidic platform to perform fluorescence in situ hybridization for chromosomal analysis

The fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) technique has been commonly employed to detect the chromosomal abnormalities. However, applications of this technique are limited due to its lengthy process and labor-intensive sample preparation. In this study, a novel integrated microfluidic chip capable of performing the entire FISH protocol automatically was reported. This novel technique can achieve several advantages, including reduce the consumption of biosamples and reagents, automation and rapid analysis compared to the conventional method. In this study, several functional microfluidic devices were integrated on a single chip to perform automatic FISH on the microfluidic platform. Experimental data demonstrated that the developed microfluidic system successfully provided superior performance for probing the chromosomal abnormality of cells. Furthermore, the novel microfluidic system performed the entire process automatically within 3 h, where the conventional method required 10 h to perform the entire protocol manually. This data indicated superior performance of the novelmethod. Our findings conclude that the novel integrated FISH protocol is more convenient to performlarge quantities of samples, which can be used in clinical trials. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.