General Liquid-crystal droplets produced by microfluidics for urea detection

Fabrication of Liquid Crystal Droplet Patterns for Monitoring Aldehyde Vapors

“…LC‐based sensors have been used to detect a wide variety of substances in the monitoring of reactions. LC‐based sensing platforms mainly include grids, capillaries, optical cells, and droplets . The differences between these platforms depend on the orientation of the LCs and the interpretation of the optical signal.…”

Specific detection of avidin–biotin binding using liquid crystal droplets

“…The labeling of avidin was carried out following a method reported by Khan et al with a slight modification [6]. Briefly, avidin was dissolved in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) buffer (pH = 7) in a reaction vial to obtain a 100 g/mL solution into which the chemical coupling agents, EDC·HCl and NHS, were added and kept for 1 h at 4 • C to activate the carboxyl group in avidin.…”

“…In addition, LC droplets possess several director configurations, which enable them to provide in-depth quantitative information of analytes [1]. LC droplets dispersed in an aqueous solution have recently emerged as simple probes to detect the adsorption and interaction of biological species such as proteins [1,2], lipids [3], endotoxin [4], glucose [5], and urea [6] at the LC/aqueous interface. It is known that the director configurations of the LC droplets, such as radial, preradial, axial, and bipolar, reflect the balance between the elasticity and the surface anchoring of the LCs inside the droplets [7].…”

“…The dissociation of the electrolyte groups from PEs induces a charged state, which creates an electric field and changes the configuration of the LC droplet [6]. Several PEs were tested for nonspecific protein detection with LC droplets.…”

Microfluidic Devices in the Fast‐Growing Domain of Single‐Cell Analysis

“…These emergent devices have the advantages of portability, parallel processing, automation, and large surface‐to‐volume ratio. This allow the integration of multiple liquid handling processes such as pumping, metering, sampling, dispensing, and sequential loading, and washing . These advantages lead to enhanced compatibility between the use of microfluidic and substantially reduces the labor work relative to conventional laboratory techniques .…”