UChicago PME Immuno Special Seminar - Dr. Nate James Cira

Simple, powerful fluidic tools for combinatorial experiments in chemistry, material science, and the life sciences. 

Manipulating liquids efficiently is essential across the sciences, yet conventional methods limit throughput and precision. We introduce Surface Patterned Omniphobic Tiles (SPOTs), a scalable, low-cost platform that combines geometry and surface engineering to harness capillarity for liquid metering and manipulation. Building on discontinuous wetting principles, SPOTs enable hundreds to thousands of experiments in parallel without complex robotics or costly consumables. The system accommodates diverse liquid types and volumes (from <10 nL to >10 µL) with excellent reproducibility. We demonstrate applications including optimizing enzyme kinetics, mapping reaction landscapes in high-throughput chemistry, screening antimicrobial combinations, evaluating perovskite materials, and genotyping microbial isolates. By uniting precision, accessibility, and versatility, SPOTs allow researchers in biology, chemistry, and materials science to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate experiments, expanding the reach of high-throughput experimentation and enabling data-rich discovery across disciplines. 

Hosted by: Prof. Joshua Weinstein