You are welcome to join the Department of Chemical Engineering on Wednesday, September 11, for a seminar on droplet-based microfluidics for high throughput biological applications by Dr. Naiwen Cui, from Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Abstract
Droplet based microfluidics offers significant advantages for performing high-throughput biological assays by encapsulating biological molecules such as single cells and single nucleic acid molecules in picoliter droplets, manipulating them and measuring their biological activities at kilohertz rate. In this talk, Dr. Cui will discuss two projects in detail:
In the first project, he and his team developed a high-throughput and cost-effective droplet in vitro two-hybrid system (drop-IVT2H) for identification of high affinity binder proteins from a pool of DNA library. They encapsulate single binder DNA molecules in picoliter drops with the IVT2H reagents containing target protein plasmids. During in vitro transcription and translation, the binding of a high-affinity binder to the target protein activates the GFP expression in situ, resulting in highly fluorescent drops, which are then isolated by the Fluorescent Activated Droplet Sorting device and identified by Next-Generation Sequencing. Using this technology, they successfully enriched and identified a high-affinity binder in p53-MDM2 binding model.
In the second project, they developed a High Fidelity Sequencing (HiFi-Seq) platform for accurate genotyping of microsatellites. HiFi-Seq exploits drop-based microfluidics to first isolate single target gDNA templates in picoliter droplets for PCR, then uses a microfluidic injection device to introduce beads that label each template’s PCR products with a unique barcode prior to Next Generation Sequencing. After algorithmically forming the consensus sequence per barcode, they obtain a set of sequences for all single templates that are error-free with high confidence. They successfully applied this technology to forensic identification, microsatellite instability and paternity testing.
Other biological applications using droplet-based microfluidics will also be mentioned and future directions will be discussed.
Biographical Sketch
Naiwen Cui recently graduated from the Bioengineering PhD under the supervision of Prof. David Weitz from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He did his undergraduate study at the University of Waterloo majoring in Mechanical Engineering.
During his PhD, he developed multiple next-generation diagnostics and therapeutic tools using high-throughput droplet-based microfluidics towards personalized medicine. To date, he has published five journal articles and filed for six US patents. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Canadian NSERC Scholarship.