Transflooder
The idea here is sort of a microfluidic analog to a general purpose electronic computer. Easily re-programmable to do vastly different tasks.
There are several levels here.
Ordered in terms of system throughput
- Red: Chip integrated mirofluidics … this needs a dedicated chip fab facility
- Orange: (DLP resin) 3D printed integrated mirofluidics (hardcoded dense microfluidic functionality in 3D but produceable locally)
- Yellow: (DLP resin) 3D printed composable "LEGO" (small cubes with ports and certain functions)
- Green: Pipetting (and on chip electrostatic droplet manipulation)
- Blue: (FFF/SLS) 3D printed (or conventionally machined) high througput fluidics
Ordered in terms of system complexity
Same order except blue ends up in the center between yellow and orange.
Crudely FFF or SLS printed microfluidics can pack complexity (meant per volume) somewhere between these two spots.
Thus the resulting systems would not be ginormous in size (also hurting throughput, beside the natural throughput ranking for simple processings).
(wiki-TODO: Was there more thinking to this?)
Use cases
Beside one-pot-chemisty more complex process with iterative introduction and wash out steps may be enabled.
Temporary attachment to surfaces is one critical tool for these kinds of synthesis processes (aka assays).
Big columns are often used to get enough surface area and yield.
Here the focus is mostly analytics an nano-quantities so tings can be smaller.
Still getting large surface area might remain a challenge.
Maybe interesting things to try and explore include
various approached to termination control for de-novo proteins:
- circumsembly evading exponential drop-off in yield but still extending on a chain with a small set of next-up interfaces
evading the specificity vs activity small orthogonal binding interface matrix dilemma
- squigglesembly terminaltion contrilled 2D (and perhaps 3D) structures by assemblying squiggly 1D shapes
- algorithmic self assembly extended to the peptide/protein space
Delineation
There is the concept of a "chemputer" advertised by Leroy Cronin.
- attacking the reproducability crisis in chemistry
- partly motivated by researching the origin of life
- focus on more broad and general chemistry
- focus on a bit bigger quantities
- (wiki-TODO: Check these assumptions more thoroughly.)
This here is likely a bit different with a specific focus on:
- foldamers for nanosystems as quite narrow subspace of chemistry (rather than more general chemistry)
- very low quantities mostly for research and analysis,
in the context of a mixed path extremely low product quantities might be sufficient),
the grey part in the graphic leads from low throughput research results to high throughput high quantity product though
if that is a desiderata for sellable side products. - mostly motivated by helping along
incremental path - bootstrapping - pathways
If anything a "chemputer" would likely be closest to (or could interface with) the (blue marked) high throughput fluidics.
This matches the in dashed box indicated "foldamer pre-synthesis in high quantity"