Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Journal articles
  4. A microfluidic Braille valve platform for on-demand production, combinatorial screening and sorting of chemically distinct droplets
 
research article

A microfluidic Braille valve platform for on-demand production, combinatorial screening and sorting of chemically distinct droplets

Utharala, Ramesh
•
Grab, Anna
•
Vafaizadeh, Vida  
Show more
October 19, 2022
Nature Protocols

Droplet microfluidics is a powerful tool for a variety of biological applications including single-cell genetics, antibody discovery and directed evolution. All these applications make use of genetic libraries, illustrating the difficulty of generating chemically distinct droplets for screening applications. This protocol describes our Braille Display valving platform for on-demand generation of droplets with different chemical contents (16 different reagents and combinations thereof), as well as sorting droplets with different chemical properties, on the basis of fluorescence signals. The Braille Display platform is compact, versatile and cost efficient (only similar to US$1,000 on top of a standard droplet microfluidics setup). The procedure includes manufacturing of microfluidic chips, assembly of custom hardware, co-encapsulation of cells and drugs into droplets, fluorescence detection of readout signals and data analysis using shared, freely available LabVIEW and Python packages. As a first application, we demonstrate the complete workflow for screening cancer cell drug sensitivities toward 74 conditions. Furthermore, we describe here an assay enabling the normalization of the observed drug sensitivity to the number of cancer cells per droplet, which additionally increases the robustness of the system. As a second application, we also demonstrate the sorting of droplets according to enzymatic activity. The drug screening application can be completed within 2 d; droplet sorting takes similar to 1 d; and all preparatory steps for manufacturing molds, chips and setting up the Braille controller can be accomplished within 1 week.

  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
research article
DOI
10.1038/s41596-022-00740-4
Web of Science ID

WOS:000870103700001

Author(s)
Utharala, Ramesh
Grab, Anna
Vafaizadeh, Vida  
Peschke, Nicolas
Ballinger, Martine
Turei, Denes
Tuechler, Nadine
Ma, Wenwei
Ivanova, Olga
Ortiz, Alejandro Gil
Show more
Date Issued

2022-10-19

Publisher

NATURE PORTFOLIO

Published in
Nature Protocols
Subjects

Biochemical Research Methods

•

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

•

drug-combinations

•

cells

•

assays

•

chip

•

transcriptomics

•

generation

•

microscopy

•

system

•

red

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LBMM  
Available on Infoscience
November 7, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/192010
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés