In nature, most microbes live in synergistic communities as a way to adapt to and thrive in their environments, such as ocean, soil, and higher organisms as hosts. These microbial communities play important roles in a wide spectrum of ecosystems and form diverse interactions with one another and with their surroundings. Microbial interactions in natural microbiota are, in many cases, crucial for the sustenance of the communities, but these interactions remain largely unknown because of the inherent complexity and difficulties in laboratory cultivation. Most of previous works were based on genetic identification, while laboratory co-cultivation for elucidating microbial intercellular networks have been hardly investigated so far. In this work, we developed a simple microfluidic device for highly parallel co-cultivation of symbiotic microbial communities and demonstrated its effectiveness in discovering synergistic interactions among microbes. Using aqueous micro-droplets, which were serially generated in Parylene-coated glass devices adapting slanted T-junction geometry and dispersed in a continuous oil phase, the device could readily encapsulate and co-cultivate various subsets of a microbial community.
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