Droplet-based microfluidic technologies for encapsulating single cells have rapidly evolved into powerful tools for single-cell analysis. In conventional passive single-cell encapsulation techniques, because cells arrive randomly at the droplet generation section, to encapsulate only a single cell with high precision, the average number of cells per droplet has to be decreased by reducing the average frequency at which cells arrive relative to the droplet generation rate. Therefore, the encapsulation efficiency for a given droplet generation rate is very low. Additionally, cell sorting operations are required prior to the encapsulation of target cells for specific cell type analysis. To address these challenges, we developed a cell encapsulation technology with a cell sorting function using a microfluidic chip. The microfluidic chip is equipped with an optical detection section to detect the optical information of cells and a sorting section to encapsulate cells into droplets by controlling a piezo element, enabling active encapsulation of only the single target cells. For a particle population including both targeted and non-targeted particles arriving at an average frequency of up to 6000 particles per s, with an average number of particles per droplet of 0.45, our device maintained a high purity above 97.9% for the single-target-particle droplets and achieved an outstanding throughput, encapsulating up to 2900 single target particles per s. The proposed encapsulation technology surpasses the encapsulation efficiency of conventional techniques, provides high efficiency and flexibility for single-cell research, and shows excellent potential for various applications in single-cell analysis.

中文翻译：

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用于高通量和选择性封装单个靶细胞的微流控装置

用于封装单细胞的基于液滴的微流体技术已迅速发展成为单细胞分析的强大工具。在传统的被动单细胞封装技术中，由于细胞随机到达液滴生成部分，为了高精度地仅封装单个细胞，必须通过降低细胞相对到达的平均频率来减少每个液滴的平均细胞数量。到液滴生成速率。因此，对于给定的液滴生成速率，封装效率非常低。此外，在封装目标细胞以进行特定细胞类型分析之前，需要进行细胞分选操作。为了应对这些挑战，我们开发了一种使用微流控芯片具有细胞分选功能的细胞封装技术。该微流控芯片配备有光学检测部分，用于检测细胞的光学信息，以及分选部分，通过控制压电元件将细胞封装成液滴，从而能够仅主动封装单个目标细胞。对于包括目标颗粒和非目标颗粒在内的颗粒群，平均频率高达 6000 个颗粒/秒，每个液滴的平均颗粒数为 0.45 个，我们的设备保持了单目标 97.9% 以上的高纯度-颗粒液滴并实现了出色的吞吐量，每秒封装多达 2900 个单一目标颗粒。所提出的封装技术超越了传统技术的封装效率，为单细胞研究提供了高效率和灵活性，并在单细胞分析的各种应用中显示出巨大的潜力。