Cyto-Mine: An Integrated, Picodroplet System for High-Throughput Single-Cell Analysis, Sorting, Dispensing, and Monoclonality Assurance.

The primary goal of bioprocess cell line development is to obtain high product yields from robustly growing and well-defined clonal cell lines in timelines measured in weeks rather than months. Likewise, high-throughput screening of B cells and hybridomas is required for most cell line engineering workflows. A substantial bottleneck in these processes is detecting and isolating rare clonal cells with the required characteristics.

Increased drop formation frequency via reduction of surfactant interactions in flow-focusing microfluidic devices.

Glass capillary based microfluidic devices are able to create extremely uniform droplets, when formed under the dripping regime, at low setup costs due to their ease of manufacture. However, as they are rarely parallelized, simple methods to increase droplet production from a single device are sought. Surfactants used to stabilize drops in such systems often limit the maximum flow rate that highly uniform drops can be produced due to the lowering interfacial tension causing jetting.

Large ultrathin shelled drops produced via non-confined microfluidics.

We present a facile approach for producing large and monodisperse core-shell drops with ultrathin shells using a single-step process. A biphasic compound jet is introduced into a quiescent third (outer) phase that ruptures to form core-shell drops. Ultrathin shelled drops could only be produced within a certain range of surfactant concentrations and flow rates, highlighting the effect of interfacial tension in engulfing the core in a thin shell.