Microwell plate is well-established platform to carry out high-throughput screening of various biochemical reactions. However, microwell plate based assays have limited in consumption of reagent and reaction time, quite labor-intensive protocol, and scale-up. There are several approaches to solve limitations of microwell plate. Vanapali and Hansen group, one of the pioneering groups, successfully presented microdroplet array format as an transformation of microwell plate into small scale.  They can facilitate efficient and sensitive reaction with high throughput manner.Here, we present another fully integrated format of droplet array for miniaturizing microwell plate. This system includes droplet generation, array, storage, fusion, and elimination on a single device. The device consists of two functional regions that are droplet generator and hydrodynamic traps. To achieve multiple-droplet array, we perform repeated two step operations such as arraying and storage process. In the arraying process, droplets are sequentially trapped into hydrodynamic traps by using hydraulic pressure balance in microstructures. The unit operation of trapping can be controlled by varying the volume of droplets. In the storage process, droplets are moved from trapping sites to corresponding reaction chambers by microvalving action. In this experiment, each of reaction chambers is filled with chemically distinct twelve droplets. To demonstrate programmability and controllability, we generate complex fluorescent gradient array under the fully automated systemFinally, we believe that the droplet array with high throughput manner overcome disadvantages of conventional microwell plate assay.

Fabrication of multiple-droplet array for miniaturizing microwell plate

247th National Meeting (2014)

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