Imagine being able to sequence an organism’s entire genome for approximately $1000 total cost and days instead of months (or even years) of work. Or how about completing a high throughput screen of 100,000 chemical compounds in a matter of minutes, with a price tag of less than $10? One day soon this will no longer sound like science fiction, especially if Harvard’s new Microfluidics core facility has anything to do with it.

The term microfluidics encompasses the science and engineering behind the manipulation of minute volumes of water, typically in the context of small chips. Microfuidic chips require dramatically smaller volumes of reagents than conventional equipment and are less expensive and quicker to construct. At the Microfluidics facility opening symposium this Thursday, David Weitz from the physics department at Harvard kicked off the afternoon of talks by presenting the next wave in microfluidics, one based on single droplet mechanics forming a small contained reactor.

The newest generation of microfluidic devices focuses not on fluid flow but the reactions which can take place within a single drop of liquid, decreasing the reagent volume even further. New technologies allow the rapid generation of identical nanoliter-range or smaller-sized stable drops, which can contain any variety of chemical or biological molecules and substances, or even entire cells. Electric fields and various labeling techniques can then be used to sort and manipulate the drops.

Richard Fair from Duke University went on to discuss one such adaptation, droplet-based DNA sequencing, which takes advantage of short stands of DNA immobilized on microscopic beads. Droplets containing washing solution, enzymes, and free nucleotides can then be passed over the beads in turn, promoting a traditional DNA sequencing reaction with the familiar fluorescent signal read-out.

The current state of the technology is pretty far from the $1000 complete genome goal – the longest stretch of DNA sequence provided by droplet sequencing is an anemic 12 bases (compare that to the ~5,000,000 bases in the relatively small E. coli genome). The concentration of minds and funds at the microfluidics facility at Harvard is sure to push that number up quickly, one droplet at a time.

P.S. Do check out the link to the Richard Fair’s Digital Microfluidics facility at Duke. There are some pretty cool videos of droplet dynamics.