Mikrotröpfchen in Mikrofluidiksystemen: eine Technik für Entdeckungen in der Chemie und Biologie

Abstract

Mikrotröpfchen in Mikrofluidiksystemen bieten zahlreiche Möglichkeiten für die chemische und biologische Forschung. Sie ermöglichen die isolierte Betrachtung von Spezies oder Reaktionen, sie sind monodispers und daher für quantitative Studien geeignet, sie können für Studien in extrem kleinen Volumina sowie an einzelnen Zellen oder einzelnen Molekülen eingesetzt werden, und sie sind für Hochdurchsatzexperimente geeignet. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die Bedeutung dieser Eigenschaften im Hinblick auf neue biologische und chemische Experimente, wobei jüngste Fortschritte bei der Entwicklung von Apparaturen vorgestellt, aber auch verbleibende technologische Herausforderungen angesprochen werden. Anhand von Beispielen wird gezeigt, welche Vorteile die Kompartimentierung, die Monodispersität der Tröpfchen, die Betrachtung einzelner Moleküle und der hohe Durchsatz in Experimenten gebracht haben, die ohne den Einsatz von Mikrofluidiksystemen kaum möglich gewesen wären.

Engineering Protein Switches: Sensors, Regulators, and Spare Parts for Biology and Biotechnology

“…[72] Dedicated technologies that allow the investigation of a cell's properties under a variety of different conditions such as microfluidic lab-on-a-chip approaches, could prove very valuable, not only for switches that rely on subtle conformational changes, but also to allow fine tuning of the relative stabilities of the "on" and "off" states in switches by modular engineering approaches. [78,79] The modular architecture of switches based on mutually exclusive domain interactions seems ideally suited for a synthetic-biology type of protein engineering in which proteins switches are constructed from a toolbox of structurally and functionally well defined building blocks. [80][81][82] A prerequisite for the rational design of such protein switches is the development of quantitative models for describing the conformational behavior of these systems based on the thermodynamic properties of the individual components (their intermolecular affinities) and modeling the effects of linker length and topology on intramolecular binding equilibria.…”

An integrated microfluidic chip enabling control and spatially resolved monitoring of temperature in micro flow reactors

“…5). The luminescence of Ru(phe) 3 shows a pronounced temperature dependency over at least 0 to 120°C [78]. For initial calibration, the chips were positioned in a tempered chamber and the luminescence (excitation 420-520 nm, emission >550 nm) was recorded in the range of 25 to 70°C by means of a digital camera attached to an inverted fluorescence microscope.…”

“…Chip laboratories are attractive tools in modern chemistry and the life sciences [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Particularly attractive about this technology is the possibility to combine different processes, e.g., chemical synthesis [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and analytical observation [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] in a dead-volume-free manner on a single substrate [28,29].…”

Ultrafast Microscopy of Microfluidics: Compressed Sensing and Remote Detection

“…[1,2] One persistent issue in the design and online monitoring of microfluidic processes is the lack of a fast but precise, non-invasive detection method that unifies imaging, velocimetry, molecular sensing, and chemical spectroscopy, with universal adaptability to the various kinds of microfluidic applications. NMR spectroscopy is renowned for its unmatched potential to non-invasively reveal and correlate spatial and spectroscopic information in a large variety of chemical systems.…”