Automatic large scale generation of barcoded droplet populations

Abstract

An increasing number of biological and chemical assays have been successfully transferred to droplet-based microfluidic formats. While droplet-based microfluidics typically offers the benefits of high-throughput operation and low reagent consumption, identifying each individual droplet within a large population remains challenging. Several barcoding methods for droplets have been proposed. Herein we use a novel strategy to vastly increase the effective number of barcoded droplets produced, by actively sorting unique fluorescent barcodes from a gradient. Our method is flexible in regard to the number of barcodes, type and number of fluorophores as well as detector sensitivity. In a proof-of-concept experiment we show the production of 2304 uniquely identifiable barcoded droplets.