Abstract
Microbes could be found almost everywhere around us and have significant impacts on our human society. The treatment of microorganisms has long been seen as a complex problem. Till now, most of the genetic and phenotypic information regarding rare species is buried in the bulk microbial colony due to a lack of efficient tools to screen live bacteria. Droplet microfluidics offers a powerful approach to address this problem. However, the interactions among bacteria and their living environment are entirely restricted by the water/oil interfaces in conventional water/oil single emulsion-based microfluidic systems. Here, we demonstrate an oil-mediated all-aqueous microfluidic workflow that can overcome this drawback. In contrast to the previous works, our all-aqueous culturing environment allows cell-cell and cell-environment interactions, thus facilitating the growth of bacteria. Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles added into the alginate beads enables on-chip manipulation of the microcapsules. The core-shell structure separately encapsulates bacteria and magnetic particles in the core and shell to avoid contamination. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by single bacterium culturing in droplet-templated alginate beads. Finally, a new approach is proposed to degrade the alginate beads for post-treatment. This novel microfluidic workflow can create new opportunities for microbial applications, such as bacteria culturing and screening.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 487-497 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 1 2023 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Biotechnology
- Medicine (miscellaneous)
- Bioengineering
- Biomedical Engineering
- Pharmaceutical Science
- Computer Science Applications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Keywords
- Microfluidics
- bacteria culturing
- bacteria screening
- biomechatronics
- magnetic sorting