ABSTRACT
Knowledge of life has expanded dramatically during the twentieth century and has produced the modern disciplines of genomics and proteomics. However, there remains the great challenge of discovering the integration and regulation of these living components in time and space within the cell. As we move into the postgenomic period, the complementarity between genomics and proteomics will become apparent, and the connections between them will be exploited, although, neither genomics, proteomics, nor, for that matter, their simple combination will provide the data necessary to interconnect molecular events in living cells in time and space. e cells in a group are dierent entities. Each of them respond to the perturbations dierently (Spudich and Koshland 1976). e dierences between cells arise even among those grown in homogeneous conditions and considered to have identical genetic information. Why and how do these dierences arise? ey might be caused by several factors like unequal distributions of biomolecules in cells, mutations, interactions between cells, and uctuations of environmental elements. A system that can observe interactions between specic cells continuously under fully controlled
18.1 Introduction ......................................................................................457 18.2 On-Chip Microculture System .......................................................458
