Microelectronic engineering has revolutionized electronics, providing new, faster and cheaper ways of doing things - and now the same technology is being applied to biotechnology and molecular biology. As sample volume is reduced, reaction speed and detector sensitivity are increased whilst sample and reagent requirements and device cost are reduced. Microelectronic engineering provides the potential for bench-top versions of large and expensive equipment such as flow cytometry, or novel ones that exploit physical phenomena on the micron scale, such as dielectrophoresis for cell...