European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Genome Biology Unit, Heidelberg, Germany.
Lab Chip. 2017 Mar 14;17(6):1024-1030. doi: 10.1039/c6lc01544a.
Fluorescence-activated droplet sorting (FADS) has become a widely used technique for high-throughput screening applications. However, existing methods are very sensitive to fluctuating flow rates at the sorting junction, which can be caused by the pulsing effects of mechanical pumps, droplet aggregates or the accumulation of precipitates during lengthy biological screening applications. Furthermore, existing sorting devices allow only 2-way sorting. We present here a dielectrophoretic sorting system in which the droplets are sorted along multiple electrode pairs that run parallel to the channels. This enables highly reliable sorting (no errors were detected for more than 2000 sorting events) even when inverting the relative flow rates at a 2-way sorting junction from 80 : 20 to 20 : 80. Furthermore, our toolbox is scalable: we demonstrate on the example of a triple-colour sorting experiment with a total of four decoupled electrodes that multi-way sorting is feasible.
荧光激活液滴分选（FADS）已成为高通量筛选应用中广泛使用的技术。然而，现有的方法对分选结处的流量波动非常敏感，这种波动可能是由机械泵的脉冲效应、液滴聚集体或在长时间的生物筛选应用中沉淀物的积累引起的。此外，现有的分选设备只允许进行 2 路分选。我们在这里提出了一种介电泳分选系统，其中液滴沿着与通道平行的多个电极对进行分选。即使在将 2 路分选结处的相对流速从 80:20 反转到 20:80 时，也能实现高度可靠的分选（超过 2000 次分选事件未检测到错误）。此外，我们的工具包具有可扩展性：我们通过一个总共有四个独立电极的三色彩色分选实验的例子证明了多路分选是可行的。
