Cell assays in microcompartments driven by droplet microfluidics and hydrogel technologies

Microcompartments are miniaturized, uniform units designed to isolate and analyse individual cells, cell pairs, spheroids, or organoids, enabling massive parallel assays. This technique overcomes key limitations of traditional plate-based methods, including limited scale, high cost, and labor-intensive processing. This review highlights technologies that create these compartments, primarily leveraging droplet microfluidics and hydrogel techniques for high-throughput cellular analysis. These platforms are compatible with diverse measurement modalities, including imaging-based readouts for real-time monitoring, barcoded sequencing for multiplexed molecular profiling, and flow cytometry-based sorting for enriching functional populations. For example, water-in-oil droplets serve as picoliter-scale reaction vessels for rapid cell isolation based on antibody secretion profiles, while hydrogel platforms support single-cell clonal expansion for screening and the generation of uniform spheroids for drug testing. By enabling the massive parallelization of functional assays, microcompartment platforms are accelerating biomedical research and therapeutic development.