Abstract

Microfluidics has become attractive in the recent decade due to its ability to offer low-cost, robust and miniaturized assays at a small cost as compared to the bulk tests. The credit mainly goes to the advancement in miniaturization technologies allowing cheaper and faster fabrications of microfluidics devices. Continuous microfluidics has been developed for the study of chemical and biochemical reactions inside microchannels, but the Taylor dispersion, sample contamination on the channel walls and less mixing efficiency has offset the benefits of microfluidics. Droplet-based microfluidics, on the other hand, has emerged as a powerful tool to encapsulate chemical and biological samples in discrete droplets and has generated a diverse array of applications including biochemical reactions, chemical synthesis, drug delivery, and point-of-care diagnostics. This review will outline the droplet generation, mixing, merging and detection methods, and characterization of droplet contents.

Keywords: Droplet microfluidics; Miniaturization; Analytical chemistry; Optical detections