Droplet Orchestrator
- 1. Droplet sorting based on the number of encapsulated particles using a solenoid valve Zhenning Cao Sponsored by:
- 2. 1. About droplet microfluidics 2. Major challenges 3. Current approaches to overcome challenges 4. How our device works 5. Key advantages & your mission
- 3. What is droplet microfluidics ? Mixing Generation Encapsulation Splitting IncubationTrapping
- 4. For what can you use beads/cells encapsulated in droplets? Colloidal clusters (Y. Cho et al 2005) Gene libraries ( A. Griffiths et at 2002) Drug libraries (E. Brouzes et al 2012) All of these require all droplets to have the same number of encapsulated particles to work well.
- 5. Quorum sensing (J. Boedicker et al 2012) Cell incubation( S.Koster et al 2008) 1 Low cell loading efficiency Two major challenges 2 Impossible to generate homogenous droplet population Droplet encoding /decoding(K. Braeckmans et al 2002)
- 6. Evenly spacing beads (J. Edd et. al 2008) hydrodynamic method (M. Chabert et al 2007) Passively methods are not perfect Even the best droplet formation methods don’t create fully heterogeneous populations with a known number of particles per droplet.
- 7. Air pulse Buffer Oil droplet generation droplet interrogation Our sorting method
- 8. 20 X Objective waste channel collection channel PMT Buffer with fluorescent particles Fluorocarbon oil ControlchannelInterrogation channel Laser Dichroic Filter Preamplifier Comparator Teflon tubing Solenoid valve Compressed air Microcontroller Gauge
- 9. The Processing of the Fluorescence Intensity Data by the comparator • Record fluorescence signals as each particle within a droplet passes the detector • Count the number of pulses within the known transit time of a droplet to get the number of particles within that droplet. • Activate the compressed air jet if that number is the one you want.
- 10. Key Features • First reported method for sorting droplets by number of encapsulated particles to create homogeneous populations • Highly accurate, throughput 30 droplets/s (up to 100/s realistic) Your mission • Help us find new research and commercial uses for this devices – examples include gene and drug libraries • Please be as specific as possible and make use of the device’s unique capabilities
- 11. And thanks to our challenge sponsors: