Droplet microfluidics: fundamentals and its advanced applications

Sohrabi, Soheil; Kassir, Nour; Moraveji, Mostafa Keshavarz

doi:10.1039/d0ra04566g

Cited by 177 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 140 publications

(135 reference statements)

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“…This method involves in situ formation of many varied droplet compartments and can effectively represent and present different reaction or incubation conditions that primitive compartments could have potentially been subjected to on early Earth. Droplet-based devices manipulate discrete miniature volumes of immiscible fluids with low Reynolds numbers in laminar flow regimes [ 170 ]. This type of microfluidics allows for the generation and control of multiple microdroplets of varying composition or carrying different reactants to simultaneously create microenvironments ideally suited for many chemical, prebiotic, and biological applications and processes.…”

Section: Droplet-based Microfluidics: Speciation In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution

Jia

Caudan

Mamajanov

2021

Life

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Speciation, an evolutionary process by which new species form, is ultimately responsible for the incredible biodiversity that we observe on Earth every day. Such biodiversity is one of the critical features which contributes to the survivability of biospheres and modern life. While speciation and biodiversity have been amply studied in organismic evolution and modern life, it has not yet been applied to a great extent to understanding the evolutionary dynamics of primitive life. In particular, one unanswered question is at what point in the history of life did speciation as a phenomenon emerge in the first place. Here, we discuss the mechanisms by which speciation could have occurred before the origins of life in the context of chemical evolution. Specifically, we discuss that primitive compartments formed before the emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) could have provided a mechanism by which primitive chemical systems underwent speciation. In particular, we introduce a variety of primitive compartment structures, and associated functions, that may have plausibly been present on early Earth, followed by examples of both discriminate and indiscriminate speciation affected by primitive modes of compartmentalization. Finally, we discuss modern technologies, in particular, droplet microfluidics, that can be applied to studying speciation phenomena in the laboratory over short timescales. We hope that this discussion highlights the current areas of need in further studies on primitive speciation phenomena while simultaneously proposing directions as important areas of study to the origins of life.

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Section: Droplet-based Microfluidics: Speciation In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution

Jia

Caudan

Mamajanov

2021

Life

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“…Droplet microfluidics technology is becoming increasingly important for high throughput processes such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), gene sequencing, molecular detection, drug delivery and disease diagnostics [ 6 , 7 ]. Droplet microfluidics enables handling and analysis of a wide range of samples via the generation and manipulation of discrete droplets in micro-devices [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. Droplet microfluidic systems can provide compartmentalized droplet reactors for enhanced mixing and mass transfer within reduced diffusion time and distance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interfacial Tension Measurements in Microfluidic Quasi-Static Extensional Flows

Lee

Shen

2021

Micromachines

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Droplet microfluidics provides a versatile tool for measuring interfacial tensions between two immiscible fluids owing to its abilities of fast response, enhanced throughput, portability and easy manipulations of fluid compositions, comparing to conventional techniques. Purely homogeneous extension in the microfluidic device is desirable to measure the interfacial tension because the flow field enables symmetric droplet deformation along the outflow direction. To do so, we designed a microfluidic device consisting of a droplet production region to first generate emulsion droplets at a flow-focusing area. The droplets are then trapped at a stagnation point in the cross junction area, subsequently being stretched along the outflow direction under the extensional flow. These droplets in the device are either confined or unconfined in the channel walls depending on the channel height, which yields different droplet deformations. To calculate the interfacial tension for confined and unconfined droplet cases, quasi-static 2D Darcy approximation model and quasi-static 3D small deformation model are used. For the confined droplet case under the extensional flow, an effective viscosity of the two immiscible fluids, accounting for the viscosity ratio of continuous and dispersed phases, captures the droplet deformation well. However, the 2D model is limited to the case where the droplet is confined in the channel walls and deforms two-dimensionally. For the unconfined droplet case, the 3D model provides more robust estimates than the 2D model. We demonstrate that both 2D and 3D models provide good interfacial tension measurements under quasi-static extensional flows in comparison with the conventional pendant drop method.

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“…Fine and controllable droplets are increasingly attractive because of their diverse scientific and engineering applications involving medicine, biology, chemistry, industry and agriculture. A number of droplet fabrication methods have been developed based on physical, chemical and physiochemical principles, in which microfluidic devices have been widely used in various applications (Stone et al, 2017;Zhu and Wang, 2017;Sohrabi et al, 2020). However, the formation of droplets with uniform size and high throughput is still a great challenge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary ﬂow focusing

2021

Capillarity

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Experimental study on the liquid dripping in a capillary flow focusing process is performed. Due to the high-speed gas stream that drives the inner liquid co-flowing through an orifice, complex phenomena for the droplet formation in dripping regime can be found as the gas pressure drop and the liquid flow rate change. Periodic dripping mode can produce uniform droplets, and non-periodic ones can result in satellites and droplets of different diameters. The droplet-droplet coalescence in the core of co-flowing gas stream is also obtained. The size of resultant droplets is measured under different values of gas pressure drop and liquid flow rate. It can be seen that the droplet size tends to decrease as the gas pressure drop increases and keeps nearly the same as the liquid flow rate increases. The results also indicate that the dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary flow focusing is mainly dominated by the gas pressure drop, and the capillary flow focusing technique can produce droplets with high throughput even in the dripping regime.

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Droplet microfluidics: fundamentals and its advanced applications

Abstract: Droplet-based microfluidic systems have been shown to be compatible with many chemical and biological reagents and capable of performing a variety of operations that can be rendered programmable and reconfigurable.

Cited by 177 publications

References 140 publications

Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution

Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution

Interfacial Tension Measurements in Microfluidic Quasi-Static Extensional Flows

Dynamic behavior of droplet formation in dripping mode of capillary ﬂow focusing

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