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

这项拟议的研究旨在开发基于液滴的微流控技术，用于高通量组合研究，这对药物发现和疾病诊断应用至关重要。大多数微流控芯片是基于由各种可混溶的水相组成的单相体系，这有一些局限性，特别是在化学、蛋白质组学、基因组学、药物筛选和生物学等大规模组合研究中，因为它受到流间交叉污染的困扰。这种系统的可伸缩性也很差，因为它需要每个额外反应堆的有源组件和设备占地面积近乎线性地增加。基于两相液滴的微流体是一种可行的替代方案，其中离散液滴是由不相容的流体(如水和油)形成的。每个液滴基本上都是一个理想的微反应器，具有特定的体积，将试剂隔开，防止它们扩散。微流控液滴可以有效地放大性能，因为它们可以在皮升到纳升的范围内以1-20 kHz的速率产生，标准偏差仅为1-3%。

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 %.