Sheng Yan

Shenzhen University

Single-cell analysis is developed with an aim to understand the cellular heterogeneity, including protein content, DNA, RNA, as well as the cellular metabolism. Microflow cytometry is an emerging technology to study cells at a single-cell level in a high-throughput manner and offers rich biochemical information of cells by taking advantage of micro...

The presence of microdomes can significantly increase the surface roughness, contact area, and deformability of materials, which have been adopted in many fields including microfluidics, wearable devices, and microanalysis systems. However, the shape of liquid metal (LM) droplet is defined by the density and surface energy, which has very limited r...

Haematococcus pluvialis is a good source of astaxanthin, which reduces oxidation in the human body, treats inflammation, and slows the growth of breast and skin cancer cells. Since the size of H. pluvialis is often closely related to astaxanthin yield, size-based microalgal separation has far-reaching significance for high-value algae extraction an...

Microfluidic manipulation has been widely applied in bio-chemical research and applications, including bacteria/cell/protein mixing, separation, focusing, concentration, and trapping. One of the current severe challenges of this technique is to manipulate particles smaller than micrometer scale. In addition to multi-physical assists like acoustic a...

The advancement of microfluidics has enabled numerous discoveries and technologies in life sciences. However, due to the lack of industry standards and configurability, the design and fabrication of microfluidic devices require highly skilled technicians. The diversity of microfluidic devices discourages biologists and chemists from applying this t...

There are so many non-Newtonian fluids in our daily life, such as milk, blood, cytoplasm, and mucus, most of which are viscoelastic heterogeneous liquid containing cells, inorganic ion, metabolites, and hormones. In microfluidic microparticle-manipulating applications, the target particles are practically distributed within the biological fluids li...

This paper describes a method to fabricate the 3D microfluidic channel using the free-standing, phase-change gallium mold. Three approaches to prepare the free-standing gallium molds are described. The solid metal framework is strong enough to stand against the gravity. After casting, the embedded gallium molds are melted from solid to liquid and t...

Combined with microfluidics, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) exhibits huge application prospective in sensitive online detection. In current studies, the design and optimization of plasmonic enhanced structures in microfluidics for SERS detection could be an interesting challenge. In this work, hybrid plasmonic 2D microplates composed of...

Background Liquid metal (LM) can be integrated into microfluidic channel, bringing new functionalities of microfluidics and opening a new window for soft microfluidic electronics, due to the superior advantages of the conductivity and deformability of LMs. However, patterning the LMs into microfluidic channels requires either selective surface wett...

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) detection requires dense hotspots and a uniform distribution of analytes to obtain a stable signal with good repeatability. However, due to the coffee-ring effect on the hydrophilic substrate, and the difficulty of droplet manipulation on the superhydrophobic substrate, few substrates can ensure that the ana...

In this study, we demonstrated the label-free continuous separation and enrichment of Bacillus subtilis populations based on length using viscoelastic microfluidics. B. subtilis, a gram-positive, rod-shaped bacterium, has been widely used as a model organism and an industrial workhorse. B. subtilis can be arranged in different morphological forms,...

Microfluidics offer microenvironments for reagent delivery, handling, mixing, reaction, and detection, but often demand the affiliated equipment for liquid control for these functions. As a helpful tool, the capillary pressure control valve (CPCV) has become popular to avoid using affiliated equipment. Liquid can be handled in a controlled manner b...

Combined with photonic microstructure and plasmonic nanostructure, the optoplasmonic hybrid structure with fantastic optical properties attracts lots of attentions in recent years. With the help of light enrichment by dielectric photonic microenvironment, the embedded plasmonic nanoantennas generate much greater electromagnetic field enhancement at...

In article number 2100038, Sheng Yan and co‐workers present a simple and straightforward amalgamation‐assisted method for creating liquid metal droplets and microdomes with highly controllable sizes. The microdome can generate the vortices, enhancing the flow mixing inside the microfluidic channel. Besides, the microdomes are patterned on the surfa...

In the past few decades, microalgae-based bioremediation methods for treating heavy metal (HM)-polluted wastewater have attracted much attention by virtue of their environment friendliness, cost efficiency, and sustainability. However, their HM removal efficiency is far from practical use. Directed evolution is expected to be effective for developi...

Monophase α‐Si3N4 was prepared by a salt melt strategy using Si as a starting material. The results showed that molten salt enhanced the conversion of Si to monophase α‐Si3N4, and some as‐synthesized α‐Si3N4 nanoparticles had a hexagonal platelet morphology. The α‐Si3N4 hexagonal nanoplatelets had an average lateral dimension of about 170 nm and a...

Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. Cerevisiae) is one of the most attractive microbial species used for industrial production of value-added products and is an important model organism to understand the biology of the eukaryotic cells and humans. S. Cerevisiae has different shapes, such as spherical singlets, budded doublets, and clusters, correspo...

Adsorption process is a cost‐effective way to the dye removal and CO2 capture. Improvements of the adsorption performance and conformance to the practical application conditions are necessary steps to approach practicality. Herein, hierarchical porous carbon‐doped boron nitride (BCN) aerogels with amino modification were synthesized for the first t...

The advent of intelligent image-activated cell sorting (iIACS) has enabled high-throughput intelligent image-based sorting of single live cells from heterogeneous populations. iIACS is an on-chip microfluidic technology that builds on a seamless integration of a high-throughput fluorescence microscope, cell focuser, cell sorter, and deep neural net...

An impedimetric aptasensor for detection of endotoxin in a microfluidic chip was proposed, in which the Apt/AuNPs/SPCE sensing surface was fabricated in screen-printed electrode with good biological activity and stability. The quantitative detection of endotoxin was accomplished by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurement before and...

Platelets are anucleate cells in blood whose principal function is to stop bleeding by forming aggregates for hemostatic reactions. In addition to their participation in physiological hemostasis, platelet aggregates are also involved in pathological thrombosis and play an important role in inflammation, atherosclerosis, and cancer metastasis. The a...

Optofluidic time-stretch quantitative phase imaging (OTS-QPI) is a potent tool for biomedical applications as it enables high-throughput QPI of numerous cells for large-scale single-cell analysis in a label-free manner. However, there are a few critical limitations that hinder OTS-QPI from being widely applied to diverse applications, such as its c...

Optofluidic time-stretch quantitative phase imaging (OTS-QPI) is a powerful tool as it enables high-throughput (>10,000 cell/s) QPI of single live cells. OTS-QPI is based on decoding temporally stretched spectral interferograms that carry the spatial profiles of cells flowing on a microfluidic chip. However, the utility of OTS-QPI is troubled by di...

Sensitive in situ detection of organic molecules is highly demanded in environmental monitoring. In this work, the surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is adopted in microfluidics to detect the organic molecules with high accuracy and high sensitivity. Here the SERS substrate in microchannel consists of Ag nanoparticles synthesized by chemica...

Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) detection in microfluidics is an interesting topic for its high sensitivity, miniaturization and online detection. In this work, a SERS detection in microfluidics with the help of the Ag nanowire aggregating based on dielectrophoresis (DEP) is reported. The Raman intensities of molecule in microfluidics is...

Microalgae cells have been recognized as a promising sustainable resource to meet worldwide growing demands for renewable energy, food, livestock feed, water, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and materials. In order to ensure high-efficiency and high-quality production of biomass, biofuel, or bio-based products, purification procedures prior to the stor...

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has powerful capabilities in the field of environmental analysis and biological diagnostics because of its instinctive properties of high sensitivity and label-free detection. However, the fabrication of SERS substrate requires complicated processes and expensive equipment. This paper proposes a simple metho...

Benefiting from the strong confining light in subwavelength, plasmonic waveguide beyond diffraction limit opens an avenue to the large-scale optical integrated chip. In this work, the plasmonic waveguide is investigated on Ag and Ag–Au alloy nanowires with symmetry breaking, such as a self-bended structure, nanowire–nanoparticle system, or hollow A...

On-chip fabrication of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-active materials enables continuous, real-time sensing of targets in the microfluidic chip. However, the current techniques require the time-consuming, complicated process and costly, bulky facilities. In this work, we present a novel method for synthesis of Ag nanostructures in a mi...

Conductive elastic composites have been used widely in soft electronics and soft robotics. These composites are typically a mixture of conductive fillers within elastomeric substrates. They can sense strain via changes in resistance resulting from separation of the fillers during elongation. Thus, most elastic composites exhibit a negative piezocon...

This work investigates particle focusing under Dean-flow-coupled elasto-inertial effects in symmetric serpentine microchannels. A small amount of polymers were added to the sample solution to tune the fluid elasticity, and allow particles to migrate laterally and reach their equilibriums at the centerline of a symmetric serpentine channel under the...

Focusing and separation of particles such as cells at a high throughput are extremely attractive for biomedical applications. Particle manipulation based on inertial effects requires a high flow speed, and thus suits well to high-throughput applications. Recently, inertial focusing and separation using curvilinear microchannels have been attracting...

In the regime of inertial microfluidics, the secondary flow is widely adopted to reduce the number of the equilibrium position and improve the focusing performance of particles. At the same time, secondary flow can also enhance the mixing effect and may deteriorate particle focusing due to the induced rotating streams, especially for the particle w...

Benefiting from the induced image charge on metal film, the light energy is confined on a film surface under metal nanoparticle dimer, which is called electromagnetic field redistribution. In this work, electromagnetic field distribution of metal nanoparticle monomer or dimer on graphene is investigated through finite-difference time-domain method....

With high sensitivity at single molecule level, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is considered as an ultrasensitive optical detection technology with broad application prospects in lots of fields. However, the complicated fabrication and unaffordable price of SERS substrate are still a roadblock on the way to be widely used in industry. In...

If a full band gap closes and then reopens when we continuously deform a periodic system while keeping its symmetry, a topological phase transition usually occurs. A common model demonstrating such a topological phase transition in condensed matter physics is the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. As well known, two distinct topological phases emerg...

If a full band gap closes and then reopens when we continuously deform a periodic system while keeping its symmetry, a topological phase transition usually occurs. A common model demonstrating such a topological phase transition in condensed matter physics is the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. As well known, two distinct topological phases emerg...

The research fields of trapping nanoparticles have experienced a huge development in recent years, which mainly benefits from the unique field enhancement in plasmonic nanomaterials. Since the large field enhancement originates from the excited localized surface plasmon at the metal surface, exploring novel metal nanostructures with high trapping e...

Functional nanoparticles comprised of liquid metals, such as eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn) and Galinstan, present exciting opportunities in the fields of flexible electronics, sensors, catalysts, and drug delivery systems. Methods used currently for producing liquid metal nanoparticles have significant disadvantages as they rely on both bulky and...

Supplemenary information for <Tunable particle separation in a dielectrophoresis (DEP)- inertial microfluidic device>

Particle separation is indispensable in many microfluidic systems and holds a broad range of biomedical applications. Inertial microfluidic devices that work solely on intrinsic hydrodynamic forces and inertial effects can offer label-free, high throughput and high efficiency separation performance. However, the working range of the current inertia...

This work presents a simple, low-cost method to fabricate semi-circular channels using solder paste, which can amalgamate the cooper surface to form a half-cylinder mould using the surface tension of Sn-Pd alloy (the main component in solder paste). This technique enables semi-circular channels to be manufactured with different dimensions. These se...

In this work, a novel double-layer microfluidic device for enhancing particle focusing was presented. The double-layer device consists of a channel with expansion-contraction array and periodical slanted grooves. The secondary flows induced by the grooves modulate the flow patterns in the expansion-contraction-array (ECA) channel, further affecting...

Microfluidic systems enable rapid diagnosis of diseases, biological analysis, drug screening, and high-precision materials synthesis. In spite of these remarkable abilities, conventional microfluidic systems are microfabricated monolithically on a single platform and their operations rely on bulky expensive external equipment. This restricts their...

Numerous lab-on-a-chip applications benefit from channels with complex structures and configurations in the areas of tissue engineering and clinical diagnostics. The current fabrication approaches require time-consuming, complicated processes and bulky, expensive facilities. In this work, we propose a novel method for fabrication of complex channel...

Recently, research on particle migration in non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluids has gained considerable attention. In a viscoelastic fluid, three dimensional (3D) particle focusing can be easily realized in simple channels without the need of any external force fields or complex microchannel structure compared with that in a Newtonian fluid. Due to i...

Proteinuria is an established risk marker for progressive renal function loss and patients would significantly benefit from a point-of-care testing. Although extensive work has been done to develop the microfluidic devices for the detection of urinary protein, they need the complicated operation and bulky peripherals. Here, we present a rapid, mask...

Manually hand-powered portable microfluidic devices are cheap alternatives for point-of-care diagnostics. Currently, on-field tests are limited by the use of bulky syringe pumps, pressure controller and equipment. In this work, we present a manually operated microfluidic device incorporated with a groove-based channel. We show that the device is ca...

In the capillary venules, blood cells auto-separate with red blood cells aggregating near the centre of vessel and the nucleated cells marginating toward the wall of vessel. In this experiment, we used cell margination to help enrich the Jurkat cells via a groove-based channel which provides a vertical expansion-contraction structure, wherein the r...

In this paper, we proposed a microparticle manipulation approach, by which particles are able to be guided to different equilibrium positions through modulating the Reynolds number. In the microchannel with arc-shaped groove arrays, secondary flow vortex arisen due to the pressure gradient varies in the aspects of both magnitude and shape with the...

This work investigates the on-chip washing process of microparticles and cells using co-flow configuration of viscoelastic fluid and Newtonian fluid in a straight microchannel. By adding a small amount of biocompatible polymers into the particle medium or cell culture medium, the induced viscoelasticity can push particles and cells laterally from t...

White blood cells (WBCs) constitute only about 0.1% of human blood cells, yet contain rich information about the immune status of the body, thus separation of WBCs from the whole blood is an indispensable and critical sample preparation step in many scientific, clinical and diagnostic applications. In this work, we developed a continuous and high-t...