“…Although the fabrication and use of microfluidic devices has been highly successful, the understanding of flow phenomena and biochemical reaction kinetics in these systems is still limited because of the lack of appropriate analysis tools. In the past, several methods have been used to characterize flow phenomena in microfluidic devices including light microscopy (Therriault et al, 2003), confocal microscopy (Liu et al, 2000;Stroock et al, 2002), laser particle velocimetry (Grant, 1997;Meinhart et al, 1999), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (Brinkmeier et al, 1999;Dittrich and Schwille, 2002) and optical coherence tomography (Schaefer et al, 2004;Xi et al, 2004). However, few studies have investigated real-time biochemical reaction kinetics in microfluidic devices (Kamholz et al, 1999;Liu et al, 2000).…”