Deterministic droplet coding via acoustofluidics.
Journal Article (Journal Article)
Droplet microfluidics has become an indispensable tool for biomedical research and lab-on-a-chip applications owing to its unprecedented throughput, precision, and cost-effectiveness. Although droplets can be generated and screened in a high-throughput manner, the inability to label the inordinate amounts of droplets hinders identifying the individual droplets after generation. Herein, we demonstrate an acoustofluidic platform that enables on-demand, real-time dispensing, and deterministic coding of droplets based on their volumes. By dynamically splitting the aqueous flow using an oil jet triggered by focused traveling surface acoustic waves, a sequence of droplets with deterministic volumes can be continuously dispensed at a throughput of 100 Hz. These sequences encode barcoding information through the combination of various droplet lengths. As a proof-of-concept, we encoded droplet sequences into end-to-end packages (e.g., a series of 50 droplets), which consisted of an address barcode with binary volumetric combinations and a sample package with consistent volumes for hosting analytes. This acoustofluidics-based, deterministic droplet coding technique enables the tagging of droplets with high capacity and high error-tolerance, and can potentially benefit various applications involving single cell phenotyping and multiplexed screening.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Zhang, P; Wang, W; Fu, H; Rich, J; Su, X; Bachman, H; Xia, J; Zhang, J; Zhao, S; Zhou, J; Huang, TJ
Published Date
- November 2020
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 20 / 23
Start / End Page
- 4466 - 4473
PubMed ID
- 33103674
Pubmed Central ID
- PMC7688411
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1473-0189
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 1473-0197
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1039/d0lc00538j
Language
- eng