TABLE OF CONTENTS Miniaturization of flow-based analysis is today an actively pursued topic in analytical chemical analysis. The lab-on-a-chip concept promises to revolutionize chemical analysis systems. To reduce the cost of environmental analysis and in vitro diagnostics (IVDs), environmental and medical device designers are searching for new technologies that will enable them to develop high-quality instruments at a fraction of the cost of current laboratory systems. For many IVD and environmental manufacturers the best hope comes from recent successes with miniaturized sensor devices, which enable analysts to perform sophisticated diagnostic techniques in the field or at a patient's bedside, thereby removing routine testing from environmental laboratories and hospital settings and further reducing the costs of diagnostic testing.
The technologies associated with miniaturized or micro total (chemical) analysis systems (uTAS) are making a major contribution to the miniaturization of instrumentation. ?TAS technologies are already being applied for performing immunological analysis, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in vitro fertilization, glucose sensing, and semen analysis. Continued development of ?TAS technologies promises to produce inexpensive, self-contained microfluidic devices with performance and accuracy superior to their larger and expensive laboratory counterparts. In time, these instruments may replace many other time-consuming and less-sensitive laboratory instruments used to identify chemical compounds, biological species, and pathogens in forensic, environmental, clinical and industrial samples [16]. Miniaturized systems are a pathway to enhanced analytical performance and shorter analysis times.
The concept of micro total analysis systems ( ?TAS) or lab-on-a-chip has...
