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Giant liposome is an important lipid structure widely used in biological and medical fields. In its main preparation method, electroformation, many influencing factors must be optimized for good effect. How to collect the desired giant liposomes is another major issue. In this work, a microchip with a reactor chamber array was used to study the influences of multiple parameters, and a suitable condition could be achieved rapidly and efficiently. A tailor-made collection chamber was also integrated on the chip. Based on the multifactor and multilevel orthogonal experiment, optimal conditions of the lipid solution, buffer solution, and electric signal were achieved with high efficiency. More than one thousand giant liposomes could be formed in each microscale reactor chamber, and most of them were unilamellar. The on-chip collection ratio of giant liposome carriers could also approximate to 40%.

Liquid crystal (LC) droplets have been widely used in the detection of chemical and biological species due to their large surface area-to-volume ratio and stimuli-responsive configuration transitions. However, the wide size distribution and high mobility of LC droplets in current LC droplet-based platforms have limited their real-time and quantitative detection applications. Here, we report a novel monodisperse LC droplet-based polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchip, in which monodisperse LC droplets are in situ generated and trapped on a single microfluidic device. A flow-focusing element and a hydrodynamic-based microstructure are designed for the generation and entrapment of monodisperse LC droplets, respectively. This miniatured monodisperse LC droplet-based microchip containing a fixed number of monodisperse LC droplets allows us to quantitatively and rapidly (