Faithful Fabrication of Biocompatible Multicompartmental Memomicrospheres for Digitally Color-Tunable Barcoding

Barcodes have attracted widespread attention, especially for the multiplexed bioassays and anti-counterfeiting used toward medical and biomedical applications. An enabling gas-shearing approach is presented for generating 10-faced microspherical barcodes with precise control over the properties of each compartment. As such, the color of each compartment could be programmatically adjusted in the 10-faced memomicrospheres by using pregel solutions containing different combinations of fluorescent nanoparticles. During the process, three primary colors (red, green, and blue) are adopted to obtain up to seven merged fluorescent colors for constituting a large amount of coding as well as a magnetic compartment, capable of effective and robust high-throughput information-storage. More importantly, by using the biocompatible sodium alginate to construct the multicolor microspherical barcodes, the proposed technology is likely to advance the fields of food and pharmaceutics anti-counterfeiting. These remarkable properties point to the potential value of gas-shearing in engineering microspherical barcodes for biomedical applications in the future.