Figure 18.

Areas for innovation. Droplet microfluidics, while a proven technology for protein engineering and single-cell analysis, still has areas for innovation. Standardization: Standardization of parts, designs, and software will allow greater portability and reproducibility of microfluidic experiments between research groups. This can be supplemented with designated online open-source repositories to enable rapid sharing of designs worldwide. Experimental setup: a host of areas for improvements in the experimental setup will allow the experimenter to access new ways of performing manipulations of droplets and open up new reaction types. Additionally more rapid prototyping methods are needed to iterate on designs during the experimental process. Interconnectivity: a great challenge for droplet microfluidics is to overcome issues when adding unit operations together, a large amount of the problem having to do with pressure differences in the device and the need for end-to-end workflows. Solving this problem will therefore lead to more complex devices becoming feasible. Integration of software and standard connections will reduce the incompatibility between set-ups. Device operation: automation of all on-chip processes, including droplet tracking and real-time feedback, will lead to the ability for process control of microfluidic devices. This requires software standardization which will increase accessibility of droplet microfluidics.