Magnetic Force-Based Microfluidic Chip for Plant Seed Levitation to Simulate Microgravity Environment

For plants on Earth, gravitropism is essential for seedling establishment and plant growth. As an integrated part of plant development, gravitropic response is mainly mediated by changes of photohormone auxin. Study on auxin responses in microgravity condition is critical for illustrating how plants perceive environmental gravity conditions and then initiating auxin signaling pathway, ultimately, helping to reveal how plants response to gravity stimulus. Nevertheless, key barriers to answering these questions are the lack of a tool that can provide simulated microgravity condition. In this work, we have developed a microfluidic negative-magnetophoresis (MNM) platform to levitate Arabidopsis seeds in an equilibrium plane where magnetic force and buoyancy force are equal and opposite in directions. With the advantage of the MNM platform to simulate a microgravity environment, it’s found that auxin response is obviously decreased after seed levitation during early seed germination. This can enable the study of the physiological process and molecular mechanism of auxin in a simulated microgravity condition and benefit further applications for optimizing plant growth in space.