Teaching single-cell digital analysis using droplet-based microfluidics.

Microfluidics allows the manipulation of small quantities of reagents in a high-throughput manner and is therefore highly amenable to single cell characterization and more generally to digital analysis, with applications in fields as varied as genomics, diagnostics, directed evolution, and drug screening. The growing place of microfluidics in biology laboratories encouraged us to develop a teaching method where advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate-level students are taught to fabricate droplet-based microfluidic devices, characterize them, and finally use them to perform a digital analysis of bacterial samples based on a phenotypic marker.