TY - JOUR

T1 - Towards Small Scale

T2 - Overview and Applications of Microfluidics in Biotechnology

AU - Enders, Anton

AU - Grünberger, Alexander

AU - Bahnemann, Janina

N1 - Funding Information: This research was supported by the NIH grants P01AG043352 and R01AG046860. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Funding was provided by German Research Foundation (DFG) (Grant No. 346772917 Emmy Noether Programme).

PY - 2024/3

Y1 - 2024/3

N2 - Thanks to recent and continuing technological innovations, modern microfluidic systems are increasingly offering researchers working across all fields of biotechnology exciting new possibilities (especially with respect to facilitating high throughput analysis, portability, and parallelization). The advantages offered by microfluidic devices—namely, the substantially lowered chemical and sample consumption they require, the increased energy and mass transfer they offer, and their comparatively small size—can potentially be leveraged in every sub-field of biotechnology. However, to date, most of the reported devices have been deployed in furtherance of healthcare, pharmaceutical, and/or industrial applications. In this review, we consider examples of microfluidic and miniaturized systems across biotechnology sub-fields. In this context, we point out the advantages of microfluidics for various applications and highlight the common features of devices and the potential for transferability to other application areas. This will provide incentives for increased collaboration between researchers from different disciplines in the field of biotechnology.

AB - Thanks to recent and continuing technological innovations, modern microfluidic systems are increasingly offering researchers working across all fields of biotechnology exciting new possibilities (especially with respect to facilitating high throughput analysis, portability, and parallelization). The advantages offered by microfluidic devices—namely, the substantially lowered chemical and sample consumption they require, the increased energy and mass transfer they offer, and their comparatively small size—can potentially be leveraged in every sub-field of biotechnology. However, to date, most of the reported devices have been deployed in furtherance of healthcare, pharmaceutical, and/or industrial applications. In this review, we consider examples of microfluidic and miniaturized systems across biotechnology sub-fields. In this context, we point out the advantages of microfluidics for various applications and highlight the common features of devices and the potential for transferability to other application areas. This will provide incentives for increased collaboration between researchers from different disciplines in the field of biotechnology.

KW - Biochemical engineering

KW - Industrial biotechnology

KW - Lab-on-a-chip

KW - Medical biotechnology

KW - Microfluidic screening

KW - Microfluidics

KW - Nanofluidics

KW - Organ-on-a-chip

KW - Point-of-care

KW - Point-of-use

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143806617&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s12033-022-00626-6

DO - 10.1007/s12033-022-00626-6

M3 - Review article

AN - SCOPUS:85143806617

VL - 66

SP - 365

EP - 377

JO - Molecular Biotechnology

JF - Molecular Biotechnology

SN - 1073-6085

IS - 3

ER -