Compartmentalization of Chemically Separated Components into Droplets

Abstract

Not merely a drop in the ocean: The integration of capillary electrophoresis (CE) with droplet generation driven by electroosmotic flow enabled the compartimentalization of molecular components separated by CE in a series of droplets (see picture; the green bars represent the separated analytes). The droplet-confined bands can be docked and studied on a chip.

Basic Technologies for Droplet Microfluidics

“…This feature, in combination with the tiny size of droplets, is particularly useful for preserving the separation bands of high resolution separation methods, such as capillary electrophoresis (CE) and microscale high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), in which the separated components are usually difficult to collect [74,75] owing to the extremely small volume involved and molecular diffusion. Edgar et al [76] first proposed the use of droplets for the compartmentalization of separated components of microchip capillary electrophoresis (Fig. 8).…”

“…(6) The chaotic advection inside droplets enables complete mixing on a millisecond scale. Other advantages of droplet-based [76] microfluidic system include precisely controllable reaction time inside a droplet by adjusting the length of channel and the flow rates of fluids. The availability of a wide range of technologies for flexible generation and manipulation of droplets has enabled the applications of droplet microfluidics in a wide variety of fields, from chemical reactions [9,79] and protein crystallization [10,11] to material synthesis [12,13,[80][81][82][83], single cell analysis [84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91], DNA amplification [16], protein engineering [62,92], and high-throughput screening technologies [17,93].…”

Microtechnology meets systems biology: The small molecules of metabolome as next big targets

“…For many biological applications there is an urge for easy to manufacture systems (Fiorini and Chiu, 2005;Andersson and van den Berg, 2003). Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is currently the predominant material for microfluidic systems in life sciences (He et al, 1999;Xia and Whitesides, 1998;Whitesides et al, 2001;Yamada et al, 2004b;Hawkes et al, 2004;Huang et al, 2004;Nam et al, 2005;Hung et al, 2005;Weibel et al, 2007;Di Carlo et al, 2007;Tai et al, 2007;Bhagat et al, 2008;Das et al, 2008;Edgar et al, 2009). Once a master is produced by photolithography, the production of the PDMS-based systems by replica molding on a silicon or SU-8 master is easy and straightforward and does not even require access to clean room facilities.…”

Progress in microchip enantioseparations

“…An elegant solution was recently demonstrated by Edgar et al [44]. It is based on compartmentalization into discrete droplets on a microfluidic chip.…”