Design Artificial Stem Cell Nests for Stem Cell Niche in a Microfluidic Petri Dish Programmed by a Cell Phone

This article describes a technology to transform a petri dish into a microfluidic chip with a stem cell nest for stem cell niche engineering. A permanent magnet sphere is put in a 30 mm petri dish as an oscillator pump (O‐pump). An earphone‐sized actuator outside the petri dish receives the programmed audio signal from an MP3 player or a mobile phone to drive the in‐dish O‐pump for a microflow. There are guiding walls to form a wake area for the cell nest at the dish's center. The cell nest uses the wake to create a stable, ultraslow internal microcirculation flow. The retention half‐life of nanoparticles in the cell nest is 1419.8  ±  1.3 s. By setting the microfluidic program and supplementing five drops of the culture medium outside the cell nest every 2 d, the growth rate of embryonic stem cells in the cell nest during the 8 d automatic culture appears significantly optimized. The single clone area of embryonic stem cells increases from (3.57  ±  0.52)  ×  10 5 to (11.67  ±  1.33)  ×  10 5   µ m 2  after 2 d of the automatic culture and advances to (53.34  ±  8.37)  ×  10 5   µ m 2 after 4 d.