Synthetic biology and microfluidics have each brought enabling and revolutionary technological advances over the past few decades. However, they have advanced separately and their combined synergy has not yet been fully explored. For this week's research highlight, we selected a recent Nature Communications paper in...
Abstract "The assembly of robust, modular biological components into complex functional systems is central to synthetic biology. Here, we apply modular “plug and play” design principles to a solid-phase protein display system that facilitates protein purification and functional assays. Specifically, we capture proteins on polyacrylamide hydrogel...
Being one of the most promising areas of microfluidics, droplet microfluidics has been widely used for high-throughput data acquisition in the past decade. However, the potential of droplet microfluidic devices for generating products (therapeutics, cosmetics, etc.) with real-life applications has not yet been fully explored....
Abstract "At the single-cell level, cellular parameters, gene expression and cellular function are assayed on an individual but not population-average basis. Essential to observing and analyzing the heterogeneity and behavior of these cells/clusters is the ability to prepare and manipulate individuals. Here, we demonstrate a versatile...
A major challenge in drug development pipeline lies in avoiding organ-specific toxicity. Microfluidic in vitro models for drug toxicity screening such as organ on chips can play an important role in this sense by providing robust methods for evaluating cellular responses in a controllable microenvironment....