Karbaschi Mohsen, Shahi Payam, Abate Adam R
Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California, San Francisco, California 94158, USA.
Biomicrofluidics. 2017 Jul 20;11(4):044107. doi: 10.1063/1.4995479. eCollection 2017 Jul.
Droplet microfluidics can form and process millions of picoliter droplets with speed and ease, allowing the execution of huge numbers of biological reactions for high-throughput studies. However, at the conclusion of most experiments, the emulsions must be broken to recover and analyze their contents. This is usually achieved with demulsifiers, like perfluorooctanol and chloroform, which can interfere with downstream reactions and harm cells. Here, we describe a simple approach to rapidly and efficiently break microfluidic emulsions, which requires no chemicals. Our method allows one-pot multi-step reactions, making it useful for large scale automated processing of reactions requiring demulsification. Using a hand-held antistatic gun, we pulse emulsions with the electric field, coalescing ∼100 l of droplets in ∼10 s. We show that while emulsions broken with chemical demulsifiers exhibit potent PCR inhibition, the antistatic-broken emulsions amplify efficiently. The ability to break emulsions quickly without chemicals should make our approach valuable for most demulsification needs in microfluidics.
微滴微流控技术能够快速、轻松地形成和处理数百万个皮升大小的微滴，从而能够进行大量的生物反应以用于高通量研究。然而，在大多数实验结束时，必须破坏乳液以回收和分析其内容物。这通常通过破乳剂来实现，如全氟辛醇和氯仿，它们会干扰下游反应并对细胞造成损害。在此，我们描述了一种简单的方法，可快速、高效地破坏微流控乳液，且无需使用化学物质。我们的方法允许进行一锅多步反应，使其对于需要破乳的反应的大规模自动化处理很有用。使用手持式抗静电枪，我们用电场对乳液进行脉冲处理，在约10秒内使约100微升的微滴聚结。我们表明，虽然用化学破乳剂破坏的乳液表现出强烈的PCR抑制作用，但用抗静电破坏的乳液能有效扩增。无需化学物质即可快速破坏乳液的能力应使我们的方法对于微流控中大多数破乳需求具有重要价值。
