Bringing Microfluidics to Every Lab: Low-Cost and Open-Source Bioinstrumentation for Droplet Microfluidics Assays

Microfluidics is an interdisciplinary field that has become popular and relevant in numerous biological and medical applications due to the miniaturization and parallelization of standard laboratory procedures into a small device called microfluidic chip. Together with peripheral instruments, users are able to perform experiments in a high-throughput way, raising the amount of data to understand even more complex phenomena. Despite its advantages and popularity, the adoption of microfluidics is still limited to well-funded and highly skilled organizations because many tasks require special proprietary equipment as well as extensive know-how by operators. The open-source movement and accessible technologies such as 3D printing and open electronics (microcontroller boards and single-board computers) have contributed to democratizing microfluidics research. The scientific community has developed open-source hardware and software for different case uses at technical specifications that have been comparable with proprietary equipment performance – all while offering increased customizability and significantly lower costs. Following the modularity of microfluidic technology and open-source principles, a low-cost workstation is presented as a case study to make microfluidics more accessible, especially for droplet microfluidics assays. A strobe-enhanced microscopy stage and a syringe pump system were developed and characterized for co-flow control and droplet generation. Both instruments are cheaper than proprietary options and they can be used for research and training.