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DROPLAY: laser writing of functional patterns within biological microdroplet displays
journal contribution
posted on 2016-12-15, 11:41 authored by Chi Long Chan, Guido Bolognesi, Archis Bhandarkar, Mark S. Friddin, Nicholas J. Brooks, John M. Seddon, Robert V. Law, Laura M.C. Barter, Oscar CesIn this study, we introduce an optofluidic method for the rapid construction of large-area cell-sized droplet assemblies with user-defined, re-writable, two-dimensional patterns of functional droplets. Light responsive water-in-oil droplets capable of releasing fluorescent dye molecules upon exposure were generated and self-assembled into arrays inside a microfluidic device. This biological architecture was exploited by the scanning laser of a confocal microscope to ‘write’ user defined patterns of differentiated (fluorescent) droplets in a network of originally undifferentiated (non-fluorescent) droplets. As a result, long lasting images were produced on a droplet fabric with droplets acting as pixels of a biological monitor, which can be erased and re-written on-demand. Regio-specific light-induced droplet differentiation within a large population of droplets provides a new paradigm for the rapid construction of bio-synthetic systems with potential as tissue mimics and biological display materials.
Funding
This research was funded by EP/J017566/1, EP/L015498/1 and EP/K503733/1 grants.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Chemical Engineering
Published in
Lab on a Chip - Miniaturisation for Chemistry and BiologyVolume
16Issue
23Pages
4621 - 4627Citation
CHAN, C.L. ... et al, 2016. DROPLAY: laser writing of functional patterns within biological microdroplet displays. Lab on a Chip, 16 (23), pp. 4621 - 4627Publisher
Royal Society of ChemistryVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This is an open access article published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 3.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ISSN
1473-0197eISSN
1473-0189Publisher version
Language
- en