Microfluidic devices for cell culture applications: a magnetic reversible bonding technique

Reversible sealing techniques of a polymeric layer containing the microchannel pathway (usually poly(dimethylsiloxane)) to a second layer working as substrate is an effective technique for the fabrication of microdevices. Reversible sealing enables the access to the “experimental field” and the reuse of substrates. It is therefore potentially used for various research fields such as surface functionalization, cell analysis and other related fields. This work reports on a technique used for reversible sealing and its applications in various cell culture applications and illustrates its advantages. We finally provide comment on the outlook for reversible sealing applied to microdevices.