- Du, Ryan Shijie;
- Liu, Lily;
- Ng, Simon;
- Sambandam, Sneha;
- Adame, Bernardo Hernandez;
- Perez, Hansell;
- Ha, Kyung;
- Falcon, Claudia;
- de Rutte, Joseph;
- Di Carlo, Dino;
- Bertozzi, Andrea L
Drop-carrier particles (DCPs) are solid microparticles designed to capture uniform microscale drops of a target solution without using costly microfluidic equipment and techniques. DCPs are useful for automated and high-throughput biological assays and reactions, as well as single-cell analyses. Surface energy minimization provides a theoretical prediction for the volume distribution in pairwise droplet splitting, showing good agreement with macroscale experiments. We develop a probabilistic pairwise interaction model for a system of such DCPs exchanging fluid volume to minimize surface energy. This leads to a theory for the number of pairwise interactions of DCPs needed to reach a uniform volume distribution. Heterogeneous mixtures of DCPs with different sized particles require fewer interactions to reach a minimum energy distribution for the system. We optimize the DCP geometry for minimal required target solution and uniformity in droplet volume.