Abstract
The creation of artificial cells is an immensely challenging task in science. Artificial cells contribute to revealing the mechanisms of biological systems and deepening our understanding of them. The progress of versatile biological research fields has clarified many biological phenomena, and various artificial cell models have been proposed in these fields. Microfluidics provides useful technologies for the study of artificial cells because it allows the fabrication of cell-like compartments, including water-in-oil emulsions and giant unilamellar vesicles. Furthermore, microfluidics also allows the mimicry of cellular functions with chip devices based on sophisticated chamber design. In this review, we describe contributions of microfluidics to the study of artificial cells. Although typical microfluidic methods are useful for the creation of artificial-cell compartments, recent methods provide further benefits, including low-cost fabrication and a reduction of the sample volume. Microfluidics also allows us to create multi-compartments, compartments with artificial organelles, and on-chip artificial cells. We discuss these topics and the future perspective of microfluidics for the study of artificial cells and molecular robotics.
Highlights
Answering the question “What is life?” is a persistent challenge in science [1,2]
These compartments can be constructed by simple methods, such as the mechanical agitation of a water drop in an oil, hydration of dry films of amphiphilic molecules, or emulsion phase transfer [24,25,26,27], microfluidics-based fabrication of such compartments can further accelerate the study of artificial cells because of its technological benefits
In studies involving artificial cells, microfluidics provides a powerful means to efficiently produce a large number of compartments of a consistent size, within a scale ranging from a few dozen to several hundred micrometers
Summary
Answering the question “What is life?” is a persistent challenge in science [1,2]. In general, creating a system that is the same or similar to the system we want to understand can help us to deepen our knowledge of it. A GUV is a capsule structure formed by lipid bilayer membranes; it has been widely used as a compartment for artificial cells owing to its high similarity to the cellular membrane These compartments can be constructed by simple methods, such as the mechanical agitation (sonication, pipetting, vortexing, or tapping) of a water drop in an oil, hydration of dry films of amphiphilic molecules, or emulsion phase transfer [24,25,26,27], microfluidics-based fabrication of such compartments can further accelerate the study of artificial cells because of its technological benefits. In studies involving artificial cells, microfluidics provides a powerful means to efficiently produce a large number of compartments of a consistent size, within a scale ranging from a few dozen to several hundred micrometers It is not achieved by traditional fabrication methods of the compartments.
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