Pheno-Morphological Screening and Acoustic Sorting of 3D Multicellular Aggregates Using Drop Millifluidics.

Three-dimensional multicellular aggregates (MCAs) like organoids and spheroids have become essential tools to study the biological mechanisms involved in the progression of diseases. In cancer research, they are now widely used as in vitro models for drug testing. However, their analysis still relies on tedious manual procedures, which hinders their routine use in large-scale biological assays.

Droplet-based microprocessors.

Soft devices made of nanoliter hydrogel beads use ions for computation.

Coacervate Droplets for Synthetic Cells.

The design and construction of synthetic cells - human-made microcompartments that mimic features of living cells - have experienced a real boom in the past decade. While many efforts have been geared toward assembling membrane-bounded compartments, coacervate droplets produced by liquid-liquid phase separation have emerged as an alternative membrane-free compartmentalization paradigm. Here, the dual role of coacervate droplets in synthetic cell research is discussed: encapsulated within membrane-enclosed compartments, coacervates act as surrogates of membraneless organelles ubiquitously found in living cells; alternatively, they can be viewed as crowded cytosol-like chassis for constructing integrated synthetic cells.

Frontiers in single cell analysis: multimodal technologies and their clinical perspectives.

Single cell multimodal analysis is at the frontier of single cell research: it defines the roles and functions of distinct cell types through simultaneous analysis to provide unprecedented insight into cellular processes. Current single cell approaches are rapidly moving toward multimodal characterizations. It replaces one-dimensional single cell analysis, for example by allowing for simultaneous measurement of transcription and post-transcriptional regulation, epigenetic modifications and/or surface protein expression.

Directed Evolution in Drops: Molecular Aspects and Applications.

The process of optimizing the properties of biological molecules is paramount for many industrial and medical applications. Directed evolution is a powerful technique for modifying and improving biomolecules such as proteins or nucleic acids (DNA or RNA). Mimicking the mechanism of natural evolution, one can enhance a desired property by applying a suitable selection pressure and sorting improved variants.