Microfluidic approach, advantages

This approach to analyze exonuclease ladders seems to be a particularly promising tool to determine rapidly the sequence of oligonucleotides. Compared to conventional methods, based on the laboratory-scale preparation of a large number of samples at different enzyme and substrate concentrations followed by MALDI-MS analysis, the microfluidics approach offers the advantage of saving time and material. Furthermore, due to the limited sample handling, the risks encountered when manipulating biomolecules are also reduced as well as that of sample contamination. 

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. 

The intrinsic advantage of microfluidic reaction systems is that temperature and concentration can be changed rapidly and reproducibly on the scale of micrometers and milliseconds, as desired for nanocrystal synthesis. Microfluidic approaches have been applied to run a variety of chemical reactions, including organic syntheses [15], biochemical reactions and heterogeneous catalysis. 

In conclusion, the advantages of microfluidic devices, parallel synthesis, and combinatorial approaches can be merged to integrate a fluorescent chemical sensor array in a microfluidic chip. Fluorescent microchannel array can be produced by parallel synthesis of fluorescent monolayers covalent attached to the walls of glass microchannels. 

In the past 15 years, the use of microfluidic devices for chemical analysis has increased tremendously. Indeed, a broad range of chromatographic and electrophoretic separation methods have been implemented in microchips. However, for widespread utilization of microfabricated devices in analysis applications, particularly in the field of proteomics, further efforts are needed to develop simple fabrication techniques that achieve functional integration of multiple tasks in a single device. " In this section, we describe the fabrication of microdevices using sacrificial materials and discuss some of the advantages of this approach over conventional microfabrication methods. 

---