Development of a Simple Microfluidic Device for Characterizing Chemotaxis of Macrophage in Response to Myelin Basic Protein

Microfluidic devices are widely used for cell-based analysis. There are always needs to develop simpler, more effective and/or less costly devices than the existing ones for this application. A simple microfluidic device has been fabricated and tested for studying chemotaxis of macrophages in this study. The device was made of polydimethylsiloxane bound to a cell culture dish. It consisted of a millimeter-sized cavum and two arrays of straight channels of 5 um in width and 6um height and about two millimeters in length. The channels connected the cavum, in which a chemoattractant was loaded, with the surrounding environment, in which the macrophages were cultured. The device was first tested with a known chemoattractant - fetal bovine serum and the chemoattractive property of myelin basic protein (MBP) was then studied using the device. The macrophages were found to migrate towards to the MBP-loaded cavum in larger quantity and greater distance than those in the control samples. The results prove the usefulness of the microfluidic device for chemotaxis assay and indicate that MBP is a chemoattractant for the macrophages.