Miniaturization is rapidly growing, with novel ideas emerging in recent years. Like other fields, analytical systems have been affected by this new technology. Concretely, the capacity to carry out laboratory operations on a small scale using miniaturized devices is very appealing. Micro total analysis systems (mTAS), also called lab-on-a-chip, have renewed interest in scaling laws in the last ...

Miniaturization has been a long-term trend in clinical diagnostics instrumentation. Now a range of new technologies, including micromachining and molecular self-assembly, are providing the means for further size reduction of analyzers to devices with micro- to nanometer dimensions and submicroliter volumes. Many analytical techniques (e.g., mass spectrometry and electrophoresis) have been succe...

2 Introduction In the April edition of this magazine1 Ron Majors, in his annual report on new columns and accessories from the Pittsburgh conference, reported how at the 2002 conference the largest number of product introductions were for biomolecule separations and for liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS). He went on to state that speciality HPLC columns for chiral compounds, biomol...

The use of biocatalysts for the production of both consumer goods and building blocks for chemical synthesis is consistently gaining relevance. A significant contribution for recent advances towards further implementation of enzymes and whole cells is related to the developments in miniature reactor technology and insights into flow behavior. Due to the high level of parallelization and reduced...

Miniaturization is one of the keys to realizing ubiquitous and wearable devices with greatly improved practicality. The barriers to further miniaturization include energy sources and the systems for user input/output. Completely removing direct physical interaction with the user and conducting all interaction through intermediary devices is an easy approach to further device miniaturization. Di...