Massively parallel self-assembly of suspendable microcompartments for functional cell screening.

Capped nanovials self-assemble hydrogel compartments that cap >80% of nanovials and achieve >90% sorting yield, enabling large-scale suspendable single-cell assays.

• Why it matters: Microfluidic compartmentalization limits massive parallel screening, and open lab-on-a-particle designs can lose growing or un-attached cells.
• What they did: The authors dock spherical capping particles into bowl-shaped nanovials to form capped hydrogel compartments, then quantify capping and sorting by flow cytometry.
• The result: In mammalian, yeast, and bacterial cells, the system supports stable clonal expansion, >10,000-colony growth selections, improved secretion signal-to-noise, and antibody-secreting cell enrichment with >30-fold signal and up to 100% selection purity.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.