Fundamentals of Fluidics

Abstract

Microfluidics has had tremendous impact on miniaturization of biological experiments by reducing the reagent volumes, shortening the reaction times, and enabling multiplexed parallel operations by integrating an entire laboratory protocol onto a single chip (i.e., lab-on-a-chip or LOC). Best examples of microfluidic tools in biology are Gene chips, Capillary electrophoresis, CD-based inertial cell separation devices, integrated transcriptome analysis systems, and others. Along with miniaturization comes a tremendous opening at the microscale where slight manipulation in physics can provide unprecedented number of applications for each design. An understanding of the physical processes at microscale and their dynamics can allow biologists to leverage those for performing experiments that are practically not feasible at macroscale. Since microfluidics can allow new processes and experimental paradigms to emerge therefore, here we will focus on fundamentals that predominantly govern the processes at microscales and how we can manipulate those to address problems in the field of biology.