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Microfluidics

Pensioning off pipettes

Nature Chemistry volume 3, pages 428–429 (2011)Cite this article

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A microfluidic device design that allows a nanolitre droplet to be trapped and sequentially diluted without the need for any moving parts opens up new possibilities in high-throughput screening.

Droplet-based microfluidic devices use intersecting streams of immiscible fluids to generate a steady supply of droplets. These devices are attractive for chemistry and biology applications because each droplet is an isolated subnanolitre reaction vessel that can be loaded with a variety of reagents. Until now it has been difficult to perform sequential dilutions — a key procedure in any modern wet lab — in droplet-based devices, thus limiting their applicability. Now, writing in Nature Chemistry, Andrew deMello and co-workers report a way of sidestepping this limitation1. They combine surface tension and flow resistance to passively trap (that is, without any valves or other moving parts) a mother droplet that was continuously diluted as it shed daughter droplets.

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Figure 1: Smaller and faster.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Glenn M. Walker is in the Biomedical Engineering Department at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695, USA.,

    Glenn M Walker

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  1. Glenn M Walker
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Correspondence to Glenn M Walker.

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Walker, G. Pensioning off pipettes. Nature Chem 3, 428–429 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1060

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1060

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