Parallelization of Fission and Fusion Operations for High Throughput Generation of Combinatorial Droplets

Recent research in digital microfluidics has burgeoned as droplets can function as miniaturized reactors in biological and chemical applications. Droplet microfluidic platforms boast the ability to generate many reactions within short time periods. However, most droplet platforms digitize samples into discrete droplets and are limited to the analysis of single samples under homogeneous probe conditions. Such platforms are incapable of addressing the needs of next generation applications which require large libraries of samples and probes. Examples include SNP analysis for crop improvement and genotyping required for identification of genes associated with common diseases. JHU researchers present a parallelized droplet-based platform for ondemand, combinatorial generation of nanoliter droplets. By parallelizing fission and fusion modules, throughput is increased by two orders of magnitude. With 32 Hz droplet generation, the projected throughput of this parallelized design is nearly 3 million sampleprobe droplets per day on a single device (with 4 replicates of 750 thousand different mixtures).This translates to 240 unique sample-probe mixtures with 4 replicates per minute.

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