An Integrated Microfluidic Device for Droplet Manipulation

Microfluidic devices based on droplet manipulation have been applied in drug screening, chemical manufacturing, DNA library preparation and protein modification. A droplet manipulation system is generally composed of modules such as droplet generation, droplet fusion and droplet split. However, it remains challenging to make these devices commercially and industrially available. Here, an integrated PDMS device was designed for high-throughput generation of droplets, droplet fusion and split on a single chip. Compared with the existing devices, our device needs lower voltage for fusion and the cross-like structure enables dynamic adjustment of droplet split size, which makes this device potentially useful for quantitative analysis. In addition, the potential of this integrated device in multiplex sequencing library preparation is also discussed.