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.

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.