Scientific Reports (May 2017)

A Rapid Capillary-Pressure Driven Micro-Channel to Demonstrate Newtonian Fluid Behavior of Zebrafish Blood at High Shear Rates

  • Juhyun Lee,
  • Tzu-Chieh Chou,
  • Dongyang Kang,
  • Hanul Kang,
  • Junjie Chen,
  • Kyung In Baek,
  • Wei Wang,
  • Yichen Ding,
  • Dino Di Carlo,
  • Yu-Chong Tai,
  • Tzung K. Hsiai

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-02253-7
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

Read online

Abstract Blood viscosity provides the rheological basis to elucidate shear stress underlying developmental cardiac mechanics and physiology. Zebrafish is a high throughput model for developmental biology, forward-genetics, and drug discovery. The micro-scale posed an experimental challenge to measure blood viscosity. To address this challenge, a microfluidic viscometer driven by surface tension was developed to reduce the sample volume required (3μL) for rapid (500 s−1), at which the power law exponent (n) of zebrafish blood was nearly 1 behaving as a Newtonian fluid. The measured values of whole blood from the micro-channel (4.17cP) and the vacuum method (4.22cP) at 500 s−1 were closely correlated at 27 °C. A calibration curve was established for viscosity as a function of hematocrits to predict a rise and fall in viscosity during embryonic development. Thus, our rapid capillary pressure-driven micro-channel revealed the Newtonian fluid behavior of zebrafish blood at high shear rates and the dynamic viscosity during development.