Drop microfluidics for single virus genomics

Description:
Viruses are the most abundant and diverse “lifeforms” on Earth serving as hidden governors of the biosphere. Despite their enormous implications, tools to study viruses remain low throughput and require cultivable virus-host systems. My group invents drop microfluidic platforms that enable the direct measurement of single virus genomes for the first time. Our platforms allow extremely high throughput profiling, orders of magnitude higher than existing methods, and unbiased measurements, which has not been possible. The biggest challenge for high throughput processing of single virus genomes is the impracticality of existing drop microfluidic strategies for multi-step reactions in drops. The main hurdles are the instability of single emulsion drops, resulting in drop merging and content mixing, and the induction of uneven drop spacing on chip, which makes downstream drop manipulation challenging. I will discuss the double emulsion strategies and inertial drop ordering strategy my group has developed to overcome these long-standing challenges in drop microfluidics. I will also show how we integrated the newly developed strategies to achieve direct profiling of single virus genomes at high throughput. Single virus genomics that we pioneer opens doors to uncharted areas in virology by enabling quantitative profiling of virus evolution at unprecedented resolution and scale.

Speaker: Hee-Sun Han - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Han obtained her B.S. degree in Chemistry at Seoul National University, Korea, where she graduated summa cum laude as a valedictorian. She then moved to Cambridge, MA to pursue Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at MIT as a Samsung and KASF fellow. Under the guidance of Prof. Moungi G. Bawendi, she developed quantum dot-based intravital imaging platforms. She then worked with Prof. David Weitz at Harvard as a postdoctoral researcher, where she developed droplet-microfluidic platforms for high throughput genome sequencing. Han is the Mark A. Pytosh Scholar and Assistant Professor of Chemistry at UIUC. Her group leverages microfluidics and multiplexed imaging to identify fundamental mechanisms driving the systems-level function of heterogeneous biological systems. With her impact on bioanalytical science, she has received the Johnson&Johnson WiSTEM2D award for Science and NIH Maximizing Investigator Research Award and was selected as an Early Career Board at Analytical Chemistry.