Biocompatible surfactants for water-in-fluorocarbon emulsions.

By Christian Holtze, A. Rowat, J. Agresti, J. B. Hutchison, F. E. Angile, Christian Schmitz, Sarah Köster, Honey Duan, Katherine J. Humphry, R. Scanga and 3 more. Lab on a Chip, 2008

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drops of water-in-fluorocarbon emulsions have great potential for compartmentalizing both in vitro and in vivo biological systems; however, surfactants to stabilize such emulsions are scarce. Here we present a novel class of fluorosurfactants that we synthesize by coupling oligomeric perfluorinated polyethers (PFPE) with polyethyleneglycol (PEG). We demonstrate that these block copolymer surfactants stabilize water-in-fluorocarbon oil emulsions during all necessary steps of a drop-based experiment including drop formation, incubation, and reinjection into a second microfluidic device. Furthermore, we show that aqueous drops stabilized with these surfactants can be used for in vitro translation (IVT), as well as encapsulation and incubation of single cells. The compatability of this emulsion system with both biological systems and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic devices makes these surfactants ideal for a broad range of high-throughput, drop-based applications.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eafdce7ab754ed0155be04f2caabdbdf48a91ba2

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Surfaces, Coatings and Films

Citations in the corpus

Droplet microfluidic technology for single-cell high-throughput screening (2009, methodology): “3% wt; Dupont) added to the dye solution, or with a fluorinated PEG surfactant (37) in F oil (RainDance Technologies), with no notable difference.”
dPCR: A Technology Review (2018, background): “A critical component of this technology is the surfactant and oil formulation that assures both the stability of those microreactors and their compatibility with molecular reactions such as PCR or isothermal amplification [82].”
Ultrahigh-throughput screening in drop-based microfluidics for directed evolution (2010, methodology): “The 6-pL, 23-μm-diameter, aqueous drops are dispersed in fluorocarbon oil and stabilized by a biocompatible surfactant (15).”
Droplet based microfluidics (2012, background): “Bio-compatibility can be achieved using fluorinated oils together with a surfactant combined with a perfluorinated polyether and polyethyleneglycol [78] or for organic phases such as squalane in combination with lipids, e.”
A review of the theory, methods and recent applications of high-throughput single-cell droplet microfluidics (2013, background): “Since fluorocarbon oils are both hydrophobic and lipophobic, they are considered more biocompatible than lipophilic organic oils, as fluorocarbon oils are not likely to interact with aqueous solutes, biomolecules and cell membrane lipids [52].”