Chitosan microcapsules have been considered for various biomedical and pharmaceutical applications due to their non-toxicity, biocompatibility, mucus-adhesion and biodegradation. However, many traditional methods to prepare microcapsules are unable to control the size and size distribution, and this would limit its application. We recently describe a convenient microfluidic approach based on gas-liquid shear to generate monodisperse chitosan microcapsules. Using home-made capillary microfluidic device, monodisperse chitosan droplets are first generated by the shearing force of N2, and then the electrostatic interaction between chitosan and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) leads to the formation of monodisperse microcapsules . The size of microcapsules is in hundreds of microns and can be conveniently changed by changing the flow rate of N2. In addition, quantum dots (QDs) are packaged in the chitosan microcapsules  by using the mixed solution of chitosan and CdS QDs as inner phase. Due to potential toxicity and bio-incompatibility, incorporation of the metallic QDs into chitosan microcapsules is attractive in biological research. The obtained CdS quantum dots-chitosan (QDs-chitosan) microcapsules keep monodispersed and retain the fluorescence features of CdS QDs, which give their potential applications as fluorescent labels.

Preparation of uniform sized chitosan and QDs-chitosan microcapsules  by gas-liquid microfluidic technique

248th National Meeting (2014)

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