Advances in microfluidics in the last two decade have created a tremendous technological value which is shaping genomics; drug discovery; proteomics; and point-of-care diagnostics. The positive impact has resulted in faster analysis time, increased throughput and reduced cost amongst other important benefits. Yet, the life sciences end-users and the microfluidics players themselves are far from...

Stem-cell biology and microfluidics have both been hotbeds of research activity for the past few years, yet neither field has been able to successfully commercialize a clinical 'killer application'. Stem-cell behavior is exquisitely sensitive to environmental cues, and the important cues are difficult to establish, manipulate and quantify in traditional cell culture. Because the microenvironmen...

Rapidly increasing fields, such as systems biology, require the development and implementation of new technologies, enabling high-throughput and high-fidelity measurements of large systems. Microfluidics promises to fulfill many of these requirements, such as performing high-throughput screening experiments on-chip, encompassing biochemical, biophysical, and cell-based assays. Since the early d...

BACKGROUND The precise measurement of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma facilitates noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of fetal chromosomal aneuploidies and other applications. We tested the hypothesis that microfluidics digital PCR, in which individual fetal-DNA molecules are counted, could enhance the precision of measuring circulating fetal DNA. METHODS We first determined whether microfl...

Microfluidics holds great promise to revolutionize various areas of biological engineering, such as single cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Despite the fact that intensive efforts have been devoted into the field in the past decades, microfluidics has not yet been adopted widely. It is increasingly realized that an effective system i...

We introduce a droplet-jumping phenomenon on a superhydrophobic surface driven by the resonant AC electrowetting. The resonant electrical actuation enables a droplet to accumulate sufficient surface energy for jumping, and superhydrophobic surface minimizes adhesion and hysteresis effects. They provide the effective energy conversion from the surface energy to the kinetic energy and improve the...