Picodroplet Mass Spectrometry for Miniaturized High Throughput Analysis of Synthetic Biology Microbial Clones

摘要

This paper reports a high throughput and label-free single cell analysis method for characterizing synthetic biology clone libraries. Recent strides in DNA assembly have greatly improved synthetic biologists' ability to design and efficiently build multiple gene pathway libraries in a combinatorial fashion. The large number of strains in these libraries leads to an urgent demand on high throughput analysis to help discover high-performance strains. Mass Spectrometry (MS) measures native molecules (i.e. label-free) and yields comprehensive metabolic profiles of the presence, absence and concentration of multiple, specific molecules, but is relatively low throughput (can test up to ～10,000 samples/day).