Self-Aligned Interdigitated Transducers for Acoustofluidics

Comment: We thank the commenter for suggesting the recently published work. However, it appears that the commenter is actually one of the authors for the suggested paper. We acknowledged that your work is relevant to our current manuscript and we will cite the work accordingly. However, we would like to make several clarifications. Firstly, our current work was not inspired by your work as we were not aware of your work previously. This current manuscript was a continuation of what we have demonstrated since 2014. A total of at least 5 of our previous publications have used the approach to fabricate electrodes in microchannel. Our past works are testaments that the proposed method is both reliable and possessed distinct advantages. Second, we would also like to point out that our work is substantially different from your work. In your work, the focus is on the use of your technology in an open system. Manually pipetted droplets were mixed through the induced acoustic streaming. In our current work, we emphasized here on the self-alignment of IDTs with respect to closed microfluidic channels. Using this distinctive feature, we successfully demonstrated that our system can be used to manipulate both droplet generation and particle sorting.