Table 1.
Comparison of throughput and sensitivity of droplet-based microfluidics and selected conventional approaches.
| Selected Applications | Throughput | Limit of Detection | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conventional Methods | DMF | Conventional Methods | DMF | |
| Single-cell DNA sequencing | 384 cells/assay [136] | 50,000 cells/run [12] | 10–20 kb templates [13] (Minimum size of DNA that can be analyzed) | 3 kb can be analyzed [13] (Minimum size of DNA that can be analyzed) |
| PCR | 1 reaction/20 µL [21] | 2 million reactions/nL [21] | One mutation in 20,000 wild-type of background DNA [151] | One mutation in 5 million wild-type of background DNA [151] |
| ELISA | 96 or 384 reaction/assay [74] | 500 reaction/assay [74] | 0.1–0.2 µg/mL [74] | 0.01 µg/mL [74] |
| Single-cell sorting | 1536 cells/assay [152] | 100,000 droplets/s [113] | 80 cells/mL [153] | 10 cell/mL [113] |
| Directed evolution | 73,000 reactions/day [81] | 1 × 108 reactions/day [81] | NA | NA |
| Drug screening | 3328 cells/screening [148] | 80,000 cells/screening [148] | 1 × 105 cells [148] (Minimum requirement of cells for screening) | 10–100 cells [148] (Minimum requirement of cells for screening) |