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Microfluidics, especially droplet-microfluidics, has rapidly emerged as one of the key technologies opening up new experimental possibilities in microbiology and virology. Single-virus droplet-based microfluidics platform unlocks a new era of virology by precisely encapsulating a single virus within monodisperse microdroplets for the study of virus-host interactions and antiviral therapeutic mechanisms. As a pioneer and the undisputed global leader in the field of microfluidic development, Creative Biolabs offers custom microfluidics development services to advance the precise encapsulation of single cells, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other compounds.

Introduction of Droplet-microfluidics

Droplet microfluidics, in which droplets of sub-nanoliter volumes are generated and used as individual chemical reactors, shows significant advantages for performing high-throughput screens and sensitive assays. It promises to generate, manipulate and monitor droplets carrying single cells or viruses in a highly parallel and high throughput manner. Moreover, it is an ideal reactor for reduced usage of reactants, and the ability to rapidly execute complex workflows involving multiple steps. It has been widely used in various fields of microbiology and virology: i) detection and identification of pathogens, ii) antibiotic susceptibility testing, iii) studies of microbial physiology and iv) biotechnological selection and improvement of strains, v) studies of virus-host interactions.

Microfluidics Platform for Virus Encapsulation and Sorting

Chaipan, et al. have established a high-throughput droplet-based microfluidics platform to screen surface epitopes of single HIV particles, and then sort millions of HIV particles with >99% efficiency, which opens the way for screening diverse virus libraries with optimal antigenic features for HIV vaccine candidates. They used alkaline phosphatase (AP)-labeled broadly neutralizing antibody PGT128 to incubate with the HIV-1 particles. Then, droplet-microfluidics was used to encapsulate HIV individually in droplets, together with a fluorogenic substrate for alkaline phosphatase (AP). By measuring the fluorescence signal of each droplet, they sort the high-fluorescent droplets (HIV particles bound to broadly neutralizing enzyme-labeled antibodies) and recover the virus to perform NGS sequencing to find broadly neutralizing epitopes.

Fig.1 Detection of Single HIV Particles Efficiently Displaying Neutralizing Epitopes. (Chaipan, 2017)

Microfluidics Development for Virus Encapsulation

Based on our advanced microfluidic platforms and powerful technology, Creative Biolabs provides custom microfluidic chip development services to meet our customers’ different purposes in microfluidic encapsulation, especially in microorganism encapsulation. Compared with classical methods using bioreactors, flasks, Petri dishes and multi-well plates, our droplet-based microfluidics platform presents several advantages:

• confinement to ultra-small volumes to reduce cost and materials;
• ability to work with very large numbers of droplet reactors (high throughput);
• capability to incorporate complex liquid handling protocols in large numbers of droplets.

Creative Biolabs has developed various microfluidics systems to benefit cell, protein and microorganism encapsulation. If you are interested in our services, please do not hesitate to contact us for more detailed information. Our highly skilled scientists are ready to get started on your projects.

Reference

1. Chaipan, C.; et al. Single-virus droplet microfluidics for high-throughput screening of neutralizing epitopes on HIV particles. Cell chemical biology. 2017, 24(6): 751-757. e3.

For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.