Advanced Developments in Droplet Microfluidics

A special issue of Micromachines (ISSN 2072-666X). This special issue belongs to the section "E:Engineering and Technology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2026 | Viewed by 632

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Guest Editor
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
Interests: microfluidics; single-cell analysis; dPCR; single-cell genomics; droplet microfluidics; array of microwells; point-of-care dveices
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Dear Colleagues,

The field of droplet microfluidics has rapidly developed over the past decade, leading to many innovative applications, and continues to evolve, showcasing the latest achievements in material science, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing. For instance, droplet generation is currently being investigated to increase throughput and make this technology more accessible, and efforts to improve robustness, throughput, and ease of use are gaining momentum. Beyond droplet manipulations, this technology has played a key role in enabling novel biological or chemical applications, including high-throughput cell or bacteria screening and single-cell genomics.

This Special Issue seeks to showcase all the aspects of the exciting field of droplet microfluidics, including, but not limited to, technology development, applications, and open-source systems.

Dr. Eric Brouzes
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • droplet generation
  • droplet-based assays
  • droplet manipulation
  • droplet-based applications
  • chemical reactions inside microfluidic droplets
  • physics of microfluidic droplets
  • open-source equipment for droplet microfluidics
  • droplet microfluidics and 3D printing
  • droplet-based high-throughput screening
  • single-cell manipulation or analysis with droplet microfluidics

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

12 pages, 2307 KB  
Article
Application of Droplet-Array Sandwiching Technology to Click Reactions for High-Throughput Screening
by Yoshinori Miyata, Shoma Nishimura, Sora Kawakami, Yuriko Higuchi and Satoshi Konishi
Micromachines 2025, 16(11), 1270; https://doi.org/10.3390/mi16111270 - 12 Nov 2025
Viewed by 472
Abstract
High-throughput screening (HTS) is an essential process in drug discovery, requiring platforms that ensure reagent economy, high efficiency, and resistance to cross-contamination. Click chemistry is well suited for HTS because of its biocompatibility, high selectivity, and quantitative fluorescent readout. We focus on droplet-array [...] Read more.
High-throughput screening (HTS) is an essential process in drug discovery, requiring platforms that ensure reagent economy, high efficiency, and resistance to cross-contamination. Click chemistry is well suited for HTS because of its biocompatibility, high selectivity, and quantitative fluorescent readout. We focus on droplet-array sandwiching technology (DAST), in which two droplet microarrays (DMAs) are vertically opposed to achieve solute transport and reagent mixing by controlled contact and separation. Herein, we integrate click chemistry with DAST and evaluate its feasibility as a HTS platform. In DAST, DMAs are formed on wettability-patterned (WP; hydrophilic/hydrophobic) substrates, preserving resistance to cross-contamination. First, we immobilized dibenzocyclooctyne (DBCO) on a WP substrate and verified the occurrence of DBCO–azide reaction using an azide-functional fluorescent dye. The fluorescence intensity increased with concentration and reached a plateau at higher concentrations, indicating saturation behavior in the DBCO–azide click reaction. Second, acoustic mixing with repeated droplet contact–separation was applied to generate concentration gradients on a single substrate while maintaining droplet independence. Third, we qualitatively reproduced the expected concentration dependence of manual handling by combining DAST-based gradient formation with click reaction fluorescence readout. These results reveal that DAST enables a reagent-efficient, cross-contamination-resistant, and low-instrument-dependent HTS foundation for click-chemistry-based assays. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Developments in Droplet Microfluidics)
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