%0 Journal Article %J Nature Communications %D 2019 %T Dendronized fluorosurfactant for highly stable water-in-fluorinated oil emulsions with minimal inter-droplet transfer of small molecules %A Chowdhury, Mohammad Suman %A Zheng, Wenshan %A Kumari, Shalini %A Heyman, John %A Zhang, Xingcai %A Dey, Pradip %A Weitz, DavidA. %A Haag, Rainer %X

Fluorosurfactant-stabilized microfluidic droplets are widely used as pico- to nanoliter volume reactors in chemistry and biology. However, current surfactants cannot completely prevent inter-droplet transfer of small organic molecules encapsulated or produced inside the droplets. In addition, the microdroplets typically coalesce at temperatures higher than 80 °C. Therefore, the use of droplet-based platforms for ultrahigh-throughput combination drug screening and polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based rare mutation detection has been limited. Here, we provide insights into designing surfactants that form robust microdroplets with improved stability and resistance to inter-droplet transfer. We used a panel of dendritic oligo-glycerol-based surfactants to demonstrate that a high degree of inter- and intramolecular hydrogen bonding, as well as the dendritic architecture, contribute to high droplet stability in PCR thermal cycling and minimize inter-droplet transfer of the water-soluble fluorescent dye sodium fluorescein salt and the drug doxycycline.

%B Nature Communications %V 10 %P 1-10 %G eng %U http://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12462-5 %N 1 %R 10.1038/s41467-019-12462-5