Design of a Microfluidic Chip for Separating Rice Disease Spores

Rice is one of the world’s important food crops, but its output is affected by disease all year round. Among them, the pathogens of rice smut and sheath blight are the two most typical fungal pathogens infesting rice. Therefore, the detection of pathogenic spores is very important for studying the occurrence and development of rice diseases. In this paper, a microfluidic chip for the separation of spores of rice smut is designed. The microfluidic chip adopts a two-stage separation structure. The first-stage separation structure adopts a periodic rectangular recess structure on the side of the separation channel to achieve the purpose of separating air spores. The second-stage separation structure adopts a vertical sheath flow channel structure to enhance the separation effect. The paper used a microscope to photograph spore images to verify the separation effect. The experimental results show that the chip can complete the separation of the rice smut spores.