Droplet Microarrays in Biomedical High-Throughput Research

In order to handle a large number of experiment conditions and outputs and further accelerate the material development process, high-throughput screening has become a more and more important experimental method, which has been widely used in many fields to improve experimental efficiency. And the high-throughput platform is the basic condition for carrying out high-throughput experiments. Existing high-throughput platforms, like microtiter plates, still suffer from problems such as high consumption and low experimental throughput when dealing with precious samples and reagents and further optimization is still required. As an emerging miniaturized and integrated high-throughput platform, droplet microarrays have the advantages of low consumption of reagent and sample, short reaction time, high integration and strong operability, and have been widely studied and applied in the field of biomedicine. In this paper, the construction methods of droplet microarrays are summarized and divided into two categories surface chemistry driving and physical morphology assisted. The advantages and disadvantages of different construction methods are briefly analyzed. Then the applications of droplet microarrays in biomedical high-throughput research are also briefly introduced from the four directions of 2D cell screening, 3D cell culture, single cell analysis and whole organism screening. Finally, the problems existing in the application process of droplet microarrays and its future development direction are also summarized and analyzed.

Automated summary

High-throughput screening has become increasingly important in various fields for accelerating the material development process, with droplet microarrays as an emerging high-throughput platform that offers advantages such as low reagent and sample consumption, short reaction time, high integration, and strong operability in biomedical research.