CAREER: Massively Parallel Light-Driven Droplet Manipulation Platform for Large Scale Multiplexed Single Cell Analysis

本研究的目的是开发一种大规模平行液滴操作平台，该平台允许大规模平行光驱动操作不混相油中的水滴，用于多种化学和生物医学筛选和分析。该方法是利用一种新型的浮动电极光电镊子（FEOET）机制，通过低光强的低成本光导材料上的直接光学图像，允许电绝缘油中的电场进行光学调制。知识优势：foet器件提供了一种独特的光学驱动机制，可以驱动微米到毫米的液滴，光强低至1 W/mm2。这种极低的光功率要求将允许单个LED二极管并行处理一百万个液滴。它还开辟了使用低成本光导聚合物作为光导层的可能性，这可以大大降低大型芯片实验室系统的制造成本，该系统容纳数百万包含多种药物组合的液滴，用于大规模和高通量筛选。更广泛的影响：在这个项目过程中产生的成果和专业知识将被纳入PI在本科和研究生阶段的教学活动中。PI还将与加州大学洛杉矶分校工程学院的卓越工程与多样性中心（CEED）合作，提出暑期研究实习计划，从当地社区大学招募代表性不足的学生，建造一个“虚拟化学实验室”，允许PI的实验室通过互联网远程控制真实的液滴。

The objective of this research is to develop a massively parallel droplet manipulation platform that allows massively parallel light driven manipulation of aqueous droplets in immiscible oil for multiplexed chemical and biomedical screening and analyses. The approach is to utilize a novel floating electrode optoelectronic tweezers (FEOET) mechanism that permits optical modulation of electric field in electrically insulating oil via direct optical images on low-cost photoconductive materials with low light intensity. Intellectual Merit: FEOET devices provide a unique optical actuation mechanism that could allows driving a micrometer to millimeter droplets with light intensity as low as 1 W/mm2. This extremely low optical power requirement would permit a single LED diode to process one million droplets in parallel. It also opens up the possibility to use low-cost photoconductive polymers as the photoconductive layers that could dramatically reduces the fabrication cost for large-scale lab-on-a-chip system housing millions of droplets containing multiplexed drug combinations for large scale and high throughput screening. Broader Impact: Results and expertise developed during the course of this project will be incorporated into the PI's teaching activities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The PI will also propose Summer Research Internship Programs with Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity (CEED), an excellent outreach program housed in UCLA Engineering School, to recruit under-represented students from local community colleges for constructing a "Virtual Chemical Lab" allowing remote control of real droplets in PI's lab via Internet.