Microfluidic systems become more and more important in biotechnological applications. This is especially interesting in the pharma, cosmetics and food & beverage markets due to its small footprint. Therefore, these systems are an easy option for parallelization, modularity and scalability as well as low power and reagent consumption. On example for this is the need to measure cell density.
Culturing cells is a highly sensitive procedure. Some important parameters need to be monitored closely and accurately. This includes things like temperature, dissolved oxygen, CO2, pH, concentration of feed, VOC and cell density.
The cell density is often measured by an optical measuring principle. This takes the optical density (OD) value generated by turbidity in the cell suspension and its potential for transmitting respectively absorbing light.