The present invention provides novel microfluidic devices and methods that are useful for performing high-throughput screening assays and combinatorial chemistry. The invention provides for aqueous based emulsions containing uniquely labeled cells, enzymes, nucleic acids, etc., wherein the emulsions further comprise primers, labels, probes, and other reactants. An oil based carrier-fluid envelopes the emulsion library on a microfluidic device, such that a continuous channel provides for flow of the immiscible fluids, to accomplish pooling, coalescing, mixing, sorting, detection, etc., of the emulsion library.

A gene sequencing chip is provided, which includes: an upper substrate including a plurality of liquid inlets for inletting liquid drops; a lower substrate opposite to the upper substrate and spaced therefrom by a gap, the gap being provided for allowing the liquid drops to move therein, the lower substrate including a liquid drop operation region, the liquid drop operation region including a manipulation electrode array. The manipulation electrode array includes multiple first manipulation electrode array for preparing a gene library, multiple second manipulation electrode array for sequencing the gene library which is prepared, each first sub-array being adjacent to one of the multiple second manipulation electrode array. Based on the gene sequencing chip provided in this disclosure, operations to tiny liquid drops such as movement, fusion and splitting can be accurately manipulated by using digital microfluidic techniques, and all steps of the gene sequencing from library preparation to gene sequencing can be completed on one chip.

The present invention relates to a parallel synthesis method and synthesizer of a compound library, and more specifically provides a parallel synthesis method and synthesizer of a compound library, which uniformly distribute a first reactant and perform independent reactions in separate spaces, and since it is possible to confirm the results for various reaction variables at once, the synthesis time of the compound library can be reduced with a high synthesis yield of the product.

Embodiments disclosed herein are directed to microfluidic devices that allow for scalable on-chip screening of combinatorial libraries and methods of use thereof. Droplets comprising individual molecular species to be screened are loaded onto the microfluidic device. The droplets are labeled by methods known in the art, including but not limited to barcoding, such that the molecular species in each droplet can be uniquely identified. The device randomly sorts the droplets into individual microwells of an array of microwells designed to hold a certain number of individual droplets in order to derive combinations of the various molecular species. The paired droplets are then merged in parallel to form merged droplets in each microwell, thereby avoiding issues associated with single stream merging. Each microwell is then scanned, e.g., using microscopy, such as high content imaging microscopy, to detect the optical labels, thereby identifying the combination of molecular species in each microwell.