Application of Microfluidic Systems

Maguire TJ, Novik E, Chao P, Cheng K-C (2009) Design and application of microfluidic systems for in vitro pharmacokinetic evaluation of drug candidates. Curr Drug Metab 10 1192-1199... 

Li HE, Lin JM (2009) Applications of microfluidic systems in environmental analysis. Anal Bioanal Chem 393 555-567... 

An application of microfluidic reactors is the development of a membraneless fuel cell. Two streams, one containing a fuel such as methanol, the other an oxygen-saturated acid or alkaline stream, are merged without mixing. The laminar flow pattern in the narrow channel helps to maintain separate streams without the use of membrane separators. Opposite walls function as the electrodes and are doped with catalyst. Ion exchange, protons for the add system, takes place through the liquid-liquid interface. This is an example of a solid-liquid-liquid-solid multiphase reactor. ... 

Conveying this to the microfluidic platform approach, a set of validated microfluidic elements is required, each able to perform a certain basic liquid handling step or unit operation. Such basic unit operations are building blocks of laboratory protocols and comprise fluid transport, fluid metering, fluid mixing, valving, separation or concentration of molecules or particles (see Table 1) and others. Every microfluidic platform should offer an adequate number of microfluidic unit operations that can be easily combined to build application-specific microfluidic systems. 

In this book we endeavor to cover most of the topics highlighted in the introduction, and to present (i) technological developments achieved for the coupling of microfluidic systems to MS, both for the ESI and MALDI ionization techniques, (ii) relevant applications of microfluidics-to-MS couplings and (iii) research aiming at miniaturizing the mass spectrometer itself. We hope thereby to give a complete and comprehensive view to the reader of the miniaturization and mass spectrometry field with this collection of chapters. 

Karlinsey, J. M. Advances and Applications of Microfluidic Analysis Systems, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 2007. 

Microfluidic approaches also show strong advantage in high-throughput systems, whether these be for catalyst screening or for combinatorial synthesis. The rapidity of data generation, which has already revolutionized the science of genomics, is also a major bonus in the application of microfluidics to these synthetic problems. 

One noteworthy trend in microfluidics is the introduction of novel materials that, conventionally, have rarely been considered as microdevice substrates. One recent example is the use of a biodegradable polymer as a base material to fabricate microdevices with embedded microfluidic networks that resembles microvas-cular systems [9], work that is helping to expand the range of applications of microfluidic devices into the field of tissue engineering. 

During the past 10 years, the concepts of miniaturization have been successfully applied to chemical and biological problems. The development and application of microfluidic or lab-on-a-chip technology has been of particular interest. A few studies are developed on earth for future use in space considering the mass reduction benefit of the microscale [1,2]. But at this stage, the main difficulty is to understand fluid behavior inside the lab-on-a-chip when biological or chemical reactions occur. On earth microfluidic systems have been used in a wide variety of applications including nucleic acid separations, protein efficiency in respect to the... 

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