液滴微流控芯片系统中微液滴特性表征及氨基酸检测应用

Micro-droplet characterization and its application for amino acid detection in droplet microfluidic system

摘要:

基于液滴微流控芯片的检测和筛选系统，因其具有通量高、成本低等显著特点，近年来备受关注。该系统生成的微液滴 (皮升体积) 具有直径均一、大小可控、互不交融 (单分散性) 等特性，它作为微反应器可以进行微生物及其代谢物包埋实验和高通量检测。因此，研究微液滴的相关特性及其应用具有重要意义。文中在液滴微流控芯片系统搭建的基础上，对重要氨基酸 (谷氨酸、苯丙氨酸、色氨酸和酪氨酸) 分别进行了微液滴包埋实验，研究了包埋微液滴的重要特性参数 (如稳定性、扩散性等) ，探索了包埋微液滴对氨基酸检测分选的应用。实验表明，文中搭建的液滴微流控芯片系统可以稳定、均一地生成微液滴，微液滴大小可根据需要控制在20?50 μm之间，微液滴间无交叉污染，包埋氨基酸的微液滴的检测筛选速度大约为每分钟600个。这个研究为高通量分析和筛选产氨基酸的微生物奠定了基础。

Abstract:

Recently, the droplet microfluidic system attracts interests due to its high throughput and low cost to detect and screen. The picoliter micro-droplets from droplet microfluidics are uniform with respect to the size and shape, and could be used as monodispensed micro-reactors for encapsulation and detection of single cell or its metabolites. Therefore, it is indispensable to characterize micro-droplet and its application from droplet microfluidic system. We first constructed the custom-designed droplet microfluidic system for generating micro-droplets, and then used the micro-droplets to encapsulate important amino acids such as glutamic acid, phenylalanine, tryptophan or tyrosine to test the droplets’ properties, including the stability, diffusivity and bio-compatibility for investigating its application for amino acid detection and sorting. The custom-designed droplet microfluidic system could generate the uniformed micro-droplets with a controllable size between 20 to 50 μm. The micro-droplets could be stable for more than 20 h without cross-contamination or fusion each other. The throughput of detection and sorting of the system is about 600 micro-droplets per minute. This study provides a high-throughput platform for the analysis and screening of amino acid-producing microorganisms.