Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 13, 2025
Amplification of Escherichia coli in a Continuous-Flow-PCR Microfluidic Chip and Its Detection with a Capillary Electrophoresis System
Published on: November 21, 2023
Investigation of co-flow step emulsification (CFSE) microfluidic device and its applications in digital polymerase
Chunyang Wei1, Wei Lv2, Yanjing Ding1
1College of Medical Information and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong First Medical University & Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan 250117, China.
Hypothesis:
The co-flow step emulsification (CFSE) is very sensitive to the two-phase fluid interfaces, we conjecture that the CFSE hydrodynamic model depends on several key factors and the droplet generation process can be precisely controlled, thus to obtain droplet emulsions with the "ultra-high volume fraction of inner-phase" and "flexible droplet size" characteristics. The resulting droplets are expected to be applied to droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) with "high information density" and "wide dynamic range" advances.
Experiments:
By combining numerical simulation and fluid dynamics experiments, we have investigated the crucial parameters affecting the CFSE two-phase interface and finally achieved the prediction and guidance for CFSE droplet production.
Findings:
With the help of the CFSE device, multivolume droplet populations were produced on demand. Then, ddPCR tests were performed with DNA concentrations from 10 copies/μL to 20,000 copies/μL. The CFSE device owns an ultra-wide dynamic range (up to 5 orders of magnitude), showing excellent quantification ability of nucleic acid targets.
