Programmable Microfluidic Synthesis of Over One Thousand Uniquely Identifiable Spectral Codes

The ability to produce and distinguish microparticles containing >1100 spectral codes via the ratiometric incorporation of lanthanide nanophosphors is demonstrated. It is shown that 98% of these microparticles, which are termed MRBLEs (microspheres with ratiometric barcode lanthanide encoding), can be assigned to a code with >99.99% confidence, representing the largest purely spectral code set produced to date.