Droplet-based microfluidic platforms for the encapsulation and screening of Mammalian cells and multicellular organisms.

By Jenifer Clausell-Tormos, Diana Lieber, Jean-Christophe Baret, A. El-Harrak, Oliver J. Miller, L. Frenz, J. Blouwolff, Katherine J. Humphry, S. Köster, Honey Duan and 4 more. Chemistry and Biology, 2008

710 citations recorded by the source corpus.

High-throughput, cell-based assays require small sample volumes to reduce assay costs and to allow for rapid sample manipulation. However, further miniaturization of conventional microtiter plate technology is problematic due to evaporation and capillary action. To overcome these limitations, we describe droplet-based microfluidic platforms in which cells are grown in aqueous microcompartments separated by an inert perfluorocarbon carrier oil. Synthesis of biocompatible surfactants and identification of gas-permeable storage systems allowed human cells, and even a multicellular organism (C. elegans), to survive and proliferate within the microcompartments for several days. Microcompartments containing single cells could be reinjected into a microfluidic device after incubation to measure expression of a reporter gene. This should open the way for high-throughput, cell-based screening that can use >1000-fold smaller assay volumes and has approximately 500x higher throughput than conventional microtiter plate assays.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f9b7178279e66543455986f2f1ce1f5c7c6c4d1

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In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Liquid-infused structured surfaces with exceptional anti-biofouling performance (2012, background): “This is consistent with reported confinement of bacteria, biofilms and even mammalian cells in oil-water emulsion studies.(57-61) Interestingly, whereas S.”
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