Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Droplet microfluidics is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field of science focused on studying the hydrodynamics and properties of biphasic flows at the microscale, and on the development of systems for practical applications in chemistry and biology. The ability to generate, manipulate and monitor millions of monodisperse picoliter water-in-oil droplets provide a new format in which experiments can be conducted faster and with minimal reagent consumption. The seminar will cover our recent work focused on the discovery and improvement of plastic-degrading enzymes and functional selection of rare strains of bacteria using passive droplet sorting by interfacial tension. I will also present novel multi-step microfluidic technologies for genomic analysis of single mammalian cells encapsulated in droplets.