Microwell Confined Electro-Coalescence for Rapid Formation of High-Throughput Droplet Array

Droplet array is widely applied in single cell analysis, drug screening, protein crystallization, etc. This work proposes and validates a method for rapid formation of uniform droplet array based on microwell confined droplets electro-coalescence of screen-printed emulsion droplets, namely electro-coalescence droplet array (ECDA). The electro-coalescence of droplets is according to the polarization induced electrostatic and dielectrophoretic forces, and the dielectrowetting effect. The photolithographically fabricated microwells are highly regular and reproducible, ensuring identical volume and physical confinement to achieve uniform droplet array, and meanwhile the microwell isolation protects the paired water droplets from further fusion and broadens its feasibility to different fluidic systems. Under optimized conditions, a droplet array with an average diameter of 85 & mu;m and a throughput of 10(6) in a 10 cm x 10 cm chip can be achieved within 5 s at 120 Vpp and 50 kHz. This ECDA chip is validated for various microwell geometries and functional materials. The optimized ECDA are successfully applied for digital viable bacteria counting, showing comparable results to the plate culture counting. Such an ECDA chip, as a digitizable and high-throughput platform, presents excellent potential for high-throughput screening, analysis, absolute quantification, etc.

Automated summary

This work proposes a method for rapid formation of uniform droplet array called electro-coalescence droplet array (ECDA). The electro-coalescence of droplets is achieved by polarization induced electrostatic and dielectrophoretic forces, and the dielectrowetting effect. Photolithographically fabricated microwells ensure identical volume and physical confinement to achieve uniform droplet array, and microwell isolation protects the paired water droplets from fusion. The optimized ECDA is successfully applied for various microwell geometries and functional materials, and shows potential for high-throughput screening and analysis.