Journal
MICROSYSTEMS & NANOENGINEERING
Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41378-020-0180-0
Keywords
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Funding
- Research Grants Council of Hong Kong [17307919, 17329516, 17304017, 17305518, 17306315, R7072-18]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [21922816]
- Seed Fund for Basic Research [201811149241, 201711159249, 201611159205]
- Seed Fund for Translational and Applied Research [201711160016]
- University of Hong Kong
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Aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) droplets have demonstrated superior compatibility over conventional water-in-oil droplets for various biological assays. However, the ultralow interfacial tension hampers efficient and stable droplet generation, limiting further development and more extensive use of such approaches. Here, we present a simple strategy to employ oil as a transient medium for ATPS droplet generation. Two methods based on passive flow focusing and active pico-injection are demonstrated to generate water-water-oil double emulsions, achieving a high generation frequency of similar to 2.4kHz. Through evaporation of the oil to break the double emulsions, the aqueous core can be released to form uniform-sized water-in-water droplets. Moreover, this technique can be used to fabricate aqueous microgels, and the introduction of the oil medium enables integration of droplet sorting to produce single-cell-laden hydrogels with a harvest rate of over 90%. We believe that the demonstrated high-throughput generation and sorting of ATPS droplets represent an important tool to advance droplet-based tissue engineering and single-cell analyses.
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