In the past ten years there has been a rapid growth of the research and application area known as Lab-on-a-Chip. After an initial focus on electrokinetic separation techniques on chip, the scope of the field has widened to include topics like microfluidics, DNA analysis, cell analysis, microreactors and mass spectrometer interfacing. As well as the analytical chemistry community, synthetic chemists, chemical engineers, biochemists and biomedical engineers are now also becoming more and more interested in using new micro- and nanotechnological techniques.

This first Lab-on-a-Chip...