Droplet Microfluidic For Single Cell Encapsulation And Digitized PCR

In recent years, droplet-based microfluidics is emerging as a novel biochemical analysis method. Due to its advantages of high-throughput, high-precision, high-efficiency and low sample cost, there are many applications of this technology, such as drug delivery, single cell analysis, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), genetic testing and so on. In this article, we simply describe the microfluidic technology with its development and current situation. Then, we introduce the fabrication of microfluidic chip and the application of droplet microfluidic. The main contents of this article are as follows:Firstly, we present a novel microfluidics fabrication method utilizing a portable ultraviolet (UV) LED as an alternative UV source for soft lithography. Upon this approach, we can repeat several common microchannels as those conventional commercial exposure machines, and both the verticality of channel sidewall and lithography resolution are proved to be acceptable.Secondly, we designed and fabricated a PDMS microfluidic chip, which use flow-focusing to generate homogeneous droplets for single-cell encapsulation. A serious of experiments have been undertaken, investigating the possibility of limiting the size of a droplet to ensure only one cell to enter with the chip designed. Then, the microchannel has been modified to tackle the problem of recirculation, which might be the main reason of large amount of empty droplets in the experiment.Finally, this article introduce the digital droplet PCR system of our own design, and describe especially its main progresses of droplet production, DNA amplification and detection.