Over the last decade, the field of droplet microfluidics has built upon the concept of droplet microreactors, i.e. the idea that a drop can be used to collect, carry and characterize chemicals, biological systems or genetic material. Although droplet microfluidics promises to miniaturize and automate standard microtiter plates on-a-chip, the field has remained dominated by a serial mindset which contrasts with the inherent 2D format of the microtiter plate. This manuscript provides a novel strategy for droplet management that allows for droplet microfluidics to be implemented easily inside 2D chambers. To do so, it relies on confinement gradients to apply forces on the droplets.
