Miniaturizing conventional analytical methods: electrophoresis, chemical reactors and detection

Fluid handling integrated into microsystems has been in use now for a number of years. Mostly, research has focused on micro pumps, valves, sensor flow cells and electrophoresis. However, the underlying idea of shrinking the whole analytical chemistry or biochemistry lab down to chip size will make it necessary to talk about interfacing these modules properly and efficiently. Recently, we have proposed a concept for a chemical microprocessor. This concept is related to an earlier attempt to define an analytical chemistry microsystem, /spl mu/-TAS (miniaturised total analysis system).