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  1. Microfluidics has developed into a mature field with applications across science and engineering, having particular commercial success in molecular diagnostics, next-generation sequencing, and bench-top analysis. Despite its ubiquity, the complexity of designing and controlling custom microfluidic devices present major barriers to adoption, requiring intuitive knowledge gained from years of experience. If these barriers were overcome, microfluidics could miniaturize biological and chemical research for non-experts through fully-automated platform development and operation. The intuition of microfluidic experts can be captured through machine learning, where complex statistical models are trained for pattern recognition and subsequently used for event prediction. Integration of machine learning with microfluidics could significantly expand its adoption and impact. Here, we present the current state of machine learning for the design and control of microfluidic devices, its possible applications, and current limitations. 
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  2. Synthetic biology is the process of forward engineering living systems. These systems can be used to produce biobased materials, agriculture, medicine, and energy. One approach to designing these systems is to employ techniques from the design of embedded electronics. These techniques include abstraction, standards, modularity, automated design, and formal semantic models of computation. Together, these elements form the foundation of “biodesign automation,” where software, robotics, and microfluidic devices combine to create exciting biological systems of the future. This paper describes a “hardware, software, wetware” codesign vision where software tools can be made to act as “genetic compilers” that transform high-level specifications into engineered “genetic circuits” (wetware). This is followed by a process where automation equipment, well-defined experimental workflows, and microfluidic devices are explicitly designed to house, execute, and test these circuits (hardware). These systems can be used as either massively parallel experimental platforms or distributed bioremediation and biosensing devices. Next, scheduling and control algorithms (software) manage these systems’ actual execution and data analysis tasks. A distinguishing feature of this approach is how all three of these aspects (hardware, software, and wetware) may be derived from the same basic specification in parallel and generated to fulfill specific cost, performance, and structural requirements. 
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  3. Abstract

    Molecular biologists rely on the use of fluorescent probes to take measurements of their model systems. These fluorophores fall into various classes (e.g. fluorescent dyes, fluorescent proteins, etc.), but they all share some general properties (such as excitation and emission spectra, brightness) and require similar equipment for data acquisition. Selecting an ideal set of fluorophores for a particular measurement technology or vice versa is a multidimensional problem that is difficult to solve with ad hoc methods due to the enormous solution space of possible fluorophore panels. Choosing sub-optimal fluorophore panels can result in unreliable or erroneous measurements of biochemical properties in model systems. Here, we describe a set of algorithms, implemented in an open-source software tool, for solving these problems efficiently to arrive at fluorophore panels optimized for maximal signal and minimal bleed-through.

     
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  4. Abstract

    Droplet-based microfluidic devices hold immense potential in becoming inexpensive alternatives to existing screening platforms across life science applications, such as enzyme discovery and early cancer detection. However, the lack of a predictive understanding of droplet generation makes engineering a droplet-based platform an iterative and resource-intensive process. We present a web-based tool, DAFD, that predicts the performance and enables design automation of flow-focusing droplet generators. We capitalize on machine learning algorithms to predict the droplet diameter and rate with a mean absolute error of less than 10μm and 20 Hz. This tool delivers a user-specified performance within 4.2% and 11.5% of the desired diameter and rate. We demonstrate that DAFD can be extended by the community to support additional fluid combinations, without requiring extensive machine learning knowledge or large-scale data-sets. This tool will reduce the need for microfluidic expertise and design iterations and facilitate adoption of microfluidics in life sciences.

     
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