IMR Press / FBE / Volume 4 / Issue 5 / DOI: 10.2741/e497

Frontiers in Bioscience-Elite (FBE) is published by IMR Press from Volume 13 Issue 2 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Review

Micro segmented-flow in biochemical and cell-based assays

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1 Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas (CNIO), C/ Melchor Fernandez Almagro 3, Madrid, 28029 Spain
2 Genome Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, Heidelberg, 69117 Germany

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

 

Front. Biosci. (Elite Ed) 2012, 4(5), 1768–1779; https://doi.org/10.2741/e497
Published: 1 January 2012
Abstract

Micro-segmented flow (e.g. in microfluidic channels, capillaries or a length of tubing) has become a promising technique in modern biology. Compared to conventional formats such as microtiter plates, sample volumes can be reduced about 1000-fold, thus allowing a massive reduction of assay costs and the use of samples available in low quantities, only (e.g. primary cells). Furthermore, assays can be highly parallelized and performed at superb spatio-temporal resolution. Here, we review the state-of-the-art in micro-segmented flow as applied in biochemical, cell- and multicellular organisms-based assays. We discuss likely future applications such as single cell / single organism proteomics and transcriptomics and point out the specific advantages and limitations compared to emulsion-based (droplet-based) approaches.

Keywords
Microfluidics
Segmented-flow
Plugs
Droplets
Emulsions
Biochemical and cell-based screens
Single cell assays
Review
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