A droplet visualization system for lab-on-a-chip applications

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The proposed research aims to develop droplet-based microfluidic technology for high-throughput combinatorial studies which are critical to drug discovery and disease diagnosis applications. The majority of microfluidic chips are based on single phase systems consisting of various miscible aqueous streams, which has several limitations, particularly for large-scale combinatorial studies in chemistry, proteomics, genomics, drug screening and biology because it is plagued with cross-contamination between streams. Such a system also scales up poorly as it requires an approximately linear increase in active components and device footprint for each additional reactor. Two-phase droplet-based microfluidics is a viable alternative where discrete droplets are formed from immiscible fluids like water and oil. Each droplet is essentially an ideal microreactor with a specified volume that compartmentalizes reagents preventing them from diffusing away. Microfluidic droplets can scale up performance effectively as they can be generated at rates between 1-20 kHz over a range of picolitres to nanolitres with a standard deviation of only 1-3 %.