han explained that harnessing the power of these diverse environmental microorganisms is of high interest to the military because they have so many different and unique functions that are currently untapped while these microorganisms are conventionally very difficult to engineer the entrap device provides the capability to readily engineer these natural microorganisms allowing synthetic biology techniques to be applied to the vast and diverse natural microorganisms enabling the agile development and manufacturing of new materials microbes in the environment are extremely diverse where we know less than 1% of these diverse microbes and thus provides a rich source of new functions and materials han said the collaborative project with the army research laboratory allows us to apply synthetic biology techniques to this extremely diverse environmental microbes opening up new ways of harnessing the power of microbes from nature dna entrap directly addresses the need for high-throughput reliable accurate and automatic systems that can be employed to streamline the labor-intensive and inefficient genetic modification processes into a rapid discovery engine the end result is a unique system that overcomes the time-consuming and labor-intensive process currently being used while also enabling multi-parameter adjustments and screening of cell-to-cell dna transfer conditions and their outcomes one of the enabling technologies to achieve high-throughput screening is microfluidics and its subset droplet microfluidics which enables researchers to study hundreds to thousands of experiments per second examined simultaneously through the use of microdroplets picture a bottle of oil and water that has been shaken up each droplet of water bouncing around in the oil would be a test event you can imagine the physical time it takes to do something on a benchtop in the lab with the movement of a hand is on the order of maybe 10 seconds per action with a lag time between each action wippold said the automated nature of microfluidics enables up to thousands of these actions per second the ability to massively scale up this process and allow us to do hundreds of thousands of different experiments in one run is just game-changing wippold said the droplet microfluidic system within the dna entrap device is composed of a series of separate but interconnected microfluidic liquid handling functions to accomplish this rapid direct cell to cell dna transfer further the number of each cell type (dna donor and receiver cells) within the droplet co-cultivation conditions and size of the droplet (thus the average distance between the cells) can all be controlled with high accuracy enabling the rapid identification of the conditions and/or cell strains that show the best dna transfer efficiencies wippold explained that the team expects the amount of time saved to be over 6 000-fold compared to a conventional assay and a corresponding reagent consumption saving of at least 100-fold for example testing a library of 1 million dna donor cells against a novel host cell (the cell receiving dna or other genetic material) under a single condition through conventional means will take an estimated 650 months wippold said in comparison running such a library through the invented droplet microfluidic platform will be accomplished within three days