Microdroplet Technology

Yonghao Zhang, Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland. During his career, he worked at the Department of Engineering, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; and the Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, England.

Philip Day, Reader in Quantitative Analytical Genomics, CIGMR, Faculty of Medicine, and Principal Investigator at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, The University of Manchester, England. During his career, he worked at the Birmingham Children's Hospital, England; the Wellcome Trust Centre for Complex Diseases, Oxford, England; Department of Biochemistry, Oxford University, England;founded the Functional Genomics Unit, Children's University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland; and at ISAS, Institute for Analytical Sciences, Dortmund, Germany.

Andreas Manz, Professor in Micro Systems for Life Sciences, Department of Physics and Mechatronics, The Saarland University, and Head of Research, KIST Europe, Saarbrucken, Germany. During his career, he worked at the Chemistry Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland; at Hitachi Corp., Tokyo, Japan; at Corporate Research, Ciba-Geigy Corp, Basel, Switzerland; at the Chemistry Department, Imperial College London, England; at Caliper Corp., Palo Alto, USA; at the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering, Technical University Dortmund, Germany; at the ISAS, Institute for Analytical Sciences, Dortmund, Germany; and at FRIAS, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany.

Over the last 20 years of microfluidics and chip engineering, so-called Lab on Chip technology has led to many exciting results, PhD theses, books, journal publications, several new journals, and commercial products. Trends have shifted from applications in chemistry to cell biology and clinical diagnostics, from electrophoresis and biosensors to digital microfluidics and droplet-based methods, and from micrometre-sized features to nanostructures and molecular self-assembly.
And there seem to be no limits in sight. The only problem arising is that academic research continues to proceed at an ever increasing pace compared to the real-world applications and commercialisation of Lab on Chip . Therefore, the purpose of this book is to bring together authors in this multidisciplinary field to provide overviewsof two-phase flow, droplets, and digital microfluidics for biological and medical applications. It is currently the only book dedicated to droplets in microfluidics that goes beyond electrowetting methods. Included are the novel areas of next generation sequencing and emulsion PCR (polymerase chain reaction), together with analyses on the ramifications of droplet-based reactions for biochemical assays and their commercial viability.

This book surveys the principle components and applications of droplet-based microfluidics. Coverage includes fundamental flow physics, methodology and components for flow control, applications in biology and chemistry and a discussion of future perspectives.

The only book dedicated to microdroplets in microfluidics to go beyond electrowetting

Preface.- Physics of multiphase microflows and microdroplets.- Microfluidic droplet manipulations and its applications.- Active control of droplet formation process in microfluidics.- Recent advances in electrowetting microdroplet technologies.- Automated droplet microfluidic chips for biochemical assays.- The dropletisation of bio-reactions.- Droplet-based microfluidics as a biomimetic principle: from PCR-based virus diagnotics to a generalized concept for handling of biomolecular information.- Droplet microreactors for materials synthesis.- Single-cell analysis.- Trends and perspectives.