Separating aqueous samples into large numbers of independent micro-droplets enables efficient study of single cells and detection of single molecules. However, as the droplet size becomes smaller, the reinforced handling process is possibly required to ensure droplets operability, resulting in increased experimental complexity. Herein, we propose a method of imitating the bio-structure of lotus leave reversal to generate a picoliter droplet array effectively. This bio-inspired structure is made of a single material PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) without any additional chemical surface treatments. Only smearing is required for embedding liquid samples in such microwells with splayed walls. In the present experiments, we have obtained a regular array of 2 pL droplets with a density of 62,500 droplets/cm2, which equivalents to 5.4 million droplets on the surface a 96 well plate. We believe that such a method contributes to the development of the efficient micro-droplet generator with a pure physical interface and thus it is applicable to biological and medical analysis.

中文翻译：

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固定在仿生负荷叶复制品上的皮升液滴的涂片观察

将水样分离成大量独立的微滴可以有效地研究单细胞和检测单分子。然而，随着液滴尺寸变小，可能需要加强处理过程来确保液滴的可操作性，从而增加了实验的复杂性。在此，我们提出了一种模仿荷叶反转生物结构的方法，以有效地生成皮升液滴阵列。这种仿生结构由单一材料 PDMS（聚二甲基硅氧烷）制成，无需任何额外的化学表面处理。只需涂抹即可将液体样品嵌入这种具有八字形壁的微孔中。在本实验中，我们获得了 2 pL 液滴的规则阵列，密度为 62,500 液滴/cm2，相当于 5。96 孔板表面有 400 万个液滴。我们相信这种方法有助于开发具有纯物理界面的高效微液滴发生器，因此它适用于生物和医学分析。