ABSTRACT
Miniaturized total analysis systems (µ-TAS) have made significant advances in the last decade since the name was coined by Manz in 1990. The concept has been developed from being a chemical sensor alternative (Manz et al., 1990) to a-lab-on-a-chip (Harrison et al., 1993; Kricka, 1998). Chip materials investigated range from silicon (Harrison et al., 1993; Parce et al., 1989; Terry et al., 1979) to glass (Fan and Harrison, 1994; Manz et al., 1993) and various plastics (Jackman, et al., 1995; McCormick et al., 1997). The application has been significantly expanded from analytical separation (Harrison et al., 1992) to on-chip polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Kopp et al., 1998; Wilding et al., 1994), DNA analysis (Burns et al., 1998; Waters et al., 1998; Woolley et al., 1996), enzyme assay (Chiem and Harrison, 1997; Hadd et al., 1997), chemical synthesis (Hossein et al., 1997), and drug discovery (Fan et al., 1997). µ-TAS became popular in the 1990s primarily due to the pioneering work by Manz and Harrison that demonstrated the power of using electroosmotic pumping for sample introduction and electrophoresis for separation. The success of Affymetrix’s DNA array-based GeneChip™ technology (Chee et al., 1996; Pease et al., 1994) stimulated great commercial interest in developing microfluidics-based products. The advantages of these µ-TAS devices (both array-based and microfluidics-based) over bench-top instruments include low reagent consumption, small sample volumes, high separation efficiency, fast reaction kinetics, ease of automation, and potential for mass-production with low cost (Manz et al., 1993).
