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

本研究的目标是开发一种大规模并行液滴操纵平台，该平台允许大规模并行光驱动操纵不相容油中的水滴，用于多路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，通过在低成本低光强的光导材料上直接成像来对电绝缘油中的电场进行光学调制。智能优点：FEOET器件提供了独特的光学驱动机制，可以以低至1W/mm2的光强驱动微米到毫米的液滴。这种极低的光功率要求将允许单个LED二极管并行处理100万个液滴。它还开辟了使用低成本光导聚合物作为光导层的可能性，可以极大地降低大规模芯片实验室系统的制造成本，该系统包含数百万个液滴，其中包含多个药物组合，用于大规模和高通量筛选。更广泛的影响：在这个项目的过程中形成的成果和专门知识将被纳入本科生和研究生的PI的教学活动。PI还将与加州大学洛杉矶分校工程学院的卓越工程和多样性中心(CEED)一起提出暑期研究实习计划，以从当地社区大学招募代表不足的学生，以建设一个能够通过互联网远程控制PI实验室中真实液滴的“虚拟化学实验室”。

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.