The advantages of this dropletbased technique include the physical and chemical isolation of
droplets eliminating the risk of cross-contamination, the fast and efficient mixing of the reagents that occurs inside droplets, the ability to digitally manipulate droplets at a very high-throughput,
the ability to incubate stable droplets off-chip and reintroduce them into the microfluidic environment for further processing and analysis, and the absence of moving parts [such as chipintegrated valves (1) or pumps]