Processing and Analyzing Biological Samples in Microchannels (Keynote)

Microfluidic devices have brought us the possibility of conducting highly efficient and automated processing and analysis of biological samples. The smaller feature sizes of the microchannels where all those operations are carried out could theoretically contribute to the physico-chemical features of miniaturized biological analyses. And also the fabrication method of the devices could lead to integration of functional elements on a single device. We’ve been working on the so-called ‘Integrated Microfluidic Devices’ for biological applications where we deal with biomolecules and living cells and tissues. In this paper, our fundamental techniques to incorporate various operations in the device such as fluidic control, detection, separation, etc. will be presented along with the actual examples of their usage in realistic applications.