Microfluidic chamber arrays for whole-organism high-throughput combinatorial chemical screening based on behavioral responses

Microorganisms are used in genetic research and drug screening because of their low complexity, ease of maintenance, and similar genetics to humans; however, their size makes it difficult for researchers to physically manipulate these microorganisms. This limits the scale on which experiments can be run. We have developed microfluidic technologies to enable high-throughput drug screening. The easy-to-use device allows rapid loading and housing C. elegans in a circular chamber array during drug screening. In addition, chemicals can be precisely delivered to the worms. Our device increases the parallel experimentation number of separate, identifiable microorganisms by ten folds.