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US 11,123,733 B2Granted
Inertial droplet generation and particle encapsulation
AssigneeIllumina, Inc.
InventorsHamed Amini, Arash Jamshidi, Tarun Kumar Khurana, Foad Mashayekhi, Yir-Shyuan Wu
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Abstract
Described are microfluidic devices and methods for providing a predetermined number of microspheres or beads, together with a cell, within a fluid droplet being processed. The system may provide each droplet with a single bead and a single cell, and the bead may contain DNA or other reagents for later identifying the specific cell associated with that bead.
Claims24
A method of generating liquid droplets containing beads and cells, the method comprising:
- inertial focusing a bead fluid having beads suspended therein into a first ordered stream of beads within a first inertial focusing microchannel;
- inertial focusing a cell fluid having cells suspended therein into a second ordered stream of cells within a second inertial focusing microchannel;
- and
- merging the first ordered stream with the second ordered stream at a convergence channel at a combined flow rate and forming a plurality of droplets at a junction, wherein each droplet comprises a first predetermined number of one or more cells and a second predetermined number of one or more beads within each droplet,
- wherein the first inertial focusing microchannel and the second inertial focusing microchannel are connected to the convergence channel and the convergence channel is connected to the junction, and
- wherein the combined flow rate is selected so that a width of the convergence channel divided by a width of the first inertial focusing microchannel is proportional to the combined flow rate of the cell fluid and the bead fluid divided by a flow rate of the bead fluid to control the number of beads per droplet.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.