Digital Microfluidics Automation of Oligonucleotide Assemblies

Abstract

Digital microfluidics can be used to reliably automate repeated ligation steps to create accurate DNA products. This investigation demonstrates assembly of single-stranded and double-stranded DNA products on digital microfluidics devices. It also presents simple, low-cost methods to integrate on-chip incubation on a commonly used digital microfluidic platform. This work presents the ligation of single-stranded and double-stranded DNA products in droplets surrounded in oil and air with on-chip and off-chip incubations. Successful assembly of DNA products was determined by verifying that the size of on-chip DNA products was equal to benchtop controls. This suggests that digital microfluidic devices are a suitable platform for automated assembly of DNA products in a variety of biomedical applications.