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. 2019 Dec 16;10:5729. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13719-9

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — a The droplet microfluidic device design allows syringe pumps to deliver surfactant in a fluorinated oil through tubing to the oil inlet and culture medium containing cells to the aqueous inlet. Filters prevent debris from clogging downstream channels while resistors reduce fluctuation in liquid flow rates. Oil separates the continuous flow of the cell culture into monodisperse droplets at the flow-focus junction. Droplets exit the device through the droplet outlet and are collected. b–e Depending on the size of the channel at the flow-focus junction, and the flow rates of the oil and aqueous phases, uniformly sized liquid or agarose droplets can be formed ensuring each encapsulated cell grows in the same volume of culture media. b, d With optimized flow rates, the average diameter of the droplets is 65–67 µm when using a 40 × 40-µm channel. c Liquid droplets in fluorinated oil plus surfactant. e Gelled agarose droplets with oil removed. Source data are available in the Source Data file.