Error-free high-throughput droplet microfluidics for microbial screening

Droplet microfluidic systems, where water-in-oil emulsion droplets can function as pico-liter-volume bioreactor, enables single-cell-resolution studies at extremely high throughput. Almost all liquid handling steps can now be conducted in droplet microfluidics format. These features make this technology extremely popular for broad ranges of microbiology and biotechnology applications, especially when the sample diversity to be screened is extremely high, in other word when the library to be screened is large. However, major challenges that prevent the even more wide-spread use of these technologies are the relatively high error rates in many droplet manipulation steps, as well as the challenges in sequentially conducting several different droplet manipulation steps often required in many biological assays of interest. Here, I present several innovations in droplet microfluidics technologies that reduce the operational errors in droplet manipulation steps as well as enable stable operations over long periods of time, and thus reducing the error rates in high-throughput multi-step screening applications.