A Tubing-Free Sample-to-Droplet Interface Enables Facile Sample Loading of Droplet Microfluidics Device Toward High-Throughput Screening | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

A Tubing-Free Sample-to-Droplet Interface Enables Facile Sample Loading of Droplet Microfluidics Device Toward High-Throughput Screening


Abstract:

Droplet microfluidics offers great potential toward high-throughput screening but is generally limited by the current tubing-based sample-to-droplet interface that induce...Show More

Abstract:

Droplet microfluidics offers great potential toward high-throughput screening but is generally limited by the current tubing-based sample-to-droplet interface that induces large sample wastage, low scalability, and lengthy sample switching idle time. In response, we have developed a universal tubing-free sample-to-droplet interface within a nanodroplet microfluidic device that shows low sample wastage, high scalability, and minimal idle time. The dual interfaces in our device reduce the sample switching downtime via parallelized operation. Cross contamination was minimized with our high washing efficiency protocol. For demonstration, we used our dual sample-to-droplet interfaces and processed 44 FAM dye samples with scrambled orders.
Date of Conference: 20-24 June 2021
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 06 August 2021
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Conference Location: Orlando, FL, USA

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Introduction

Droplet microfluidics showed great potential to facilitate many chemical and biomedical applications [1]–[4]. Different from conventional continuous-flow microfluidics, droplet microfluidics compartmentalizes reactions into massive pico- to nanoliter volume water-in-oil emulsion droplets, which achieves shorter reaction time, low reagent consumptions, high sensitivity, and enhanced signal to background ratio [1]–[4]. Those advantages have made droplet microfluidics a great platform to perform high-throughput screening (HTS) [2], [4]. However, the current tubing-based sample-to-droplet interfaces have hindered the feasibility of droplet microfluidics toward HTS due to the significant sample wastages from the prepared samples, low scalability with a large sample library, and length idle time when switching samples.

References

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