There is an increasing demand for biotech-based production of recombinant proteins for use as pharmaceuticals in the food and feed industry and in industrial applications. Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is among preferred cell factories for recombinant protein production, and there is increasing interest in improving its protein secretion capacity. Due to the complexity of the secretory machinery in eukaryotic cells, it is difficult to apply rational engineering for construction of improved strains. Here we used highthroughput microfluidics for the screening of yeast libraries, generated by UV mutagenesis. Several screening and sorting rounds resulted in the selection of eight yeast clones with significantly improved secretion of recombinant α-amylase. Efficient secretion was genetically stable in the selected clones. We performed wholegenome sequencing of the eight clones and identified 330 mutations in total. Gene ontology analysis of mutated genes revealed many biological processes, including some that have not been identified before in the context of protein secretion. Mutated genes identified in this study can be potentially used for reverse metabolic engineering, with the objective to construct efficient cell factories for protein secretion. The combined use of microfluidics screening and whole-genome sequencing to map the mutations associated with the improved phenotype can easily be adapted for other products and cell types to identify novel engineering targets, and this approach could broadly facilitate design of novel cell factories.

A high-throughput method for single cell screening by microfluidic droplet sorting is applied to a whole-genome mutated yeast cell library yielding improved production hosts of secreted industrial enzymes. The sorting method is validated by enriching a yeast strain 14 times based on its a-amylase production, close to the theoretical maximum enrichment. Furthermore, a 105 member yeast cell library is screened yielding a clone with a more than 2-fold increase in a-amylase production. The increase in enzyme production results from an improvement of the cellular functions of the production host in contrast to previous droplet-based directed evolution that has focused on improving enzyme protein structure. In the workflow presented, enzyme producing single cells are encapsulated in 20 pL droplets with a fluorogenic reporter substrate. The coupling of a desired phenotype (secreted enzyme concentration) with the genotype (contained in the cell) inside a droplet enables selection of single cells with improved enzyme production capacity by droplet sorting. The platform has a throughput over 300 times higher than that of the current industry standard, an automated microtiter plate screening system. At the same time, reagent consumption for a screening experiment is decreased a million fold, greatly reducing the costs of evolutionary engineering of production strains.

Droplet microfluidic platforms have, while enabling high-throughput manipulations and the assaying of single cell scale compartments, been lacking interfacing to allow macro scale access to the output from droplet microfluidic operations. Here, we present a simple and high-throughput method for individually directing cell containing droplets to an addressable and macro scale accessible microwell slide for downstream analysis. Picoliter aqueous droplets containing low gelling point agarose and eGFP expressing Escherichia coli (E. coli) are created in a microfluidic device, solidified to agarose beads and transferred into an aqueous buffer. A Fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS) is used to sort agarose beads containing cells into microwells in which the growth and expansion of cell colonies is monitored. We demonstrate fast sorting and high accuracy positioning of sorted 15 μm gelled droplet agarose beads into microwells (14 × 48) on a 25 mm × 75 mm microscope slide format using a FACS with a 100 μm nozzle and an xy-stage. The interfacing method presented here enables the products of high-throughput or single cell scale droplet microfluidics assays to be output to a wide range of microtiter plate formats familiar to biological researchers lowering the barriers for utilization of these microfluidic platforms.

We present a high throughput micro-droplet based method for directed evolution of yeast cell factories for improved production of industrial enzymes. The workflow includes a fluorescently activated droplet sorter which was found to accurately sort droplets with a false positive rate of 0.0002 at 300 Hz. The workflow was used to screen a library of α-amylase expressing yeast mutants. A candidate yeast strain with a more than twofold increase in α-amylase production was isolated from a single round of directed evolution.

We present a high-throughput technique to interface picoliter droplet microfluidics for single cell analysis with a macro scale accessible array platform by the addition of an agarose gelling agent to droplets and patterned positioning of the resulting hydrogel beads using a fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS). This resulted in a pattern with 95 % single bead accuracy. Agarose beads containing eGFP expressing E. Coli were single sorted into microwells and E. coli growth was monitored over time.