Open Microfluidic and Nanofluidic Systems
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The labs of the future will be "labs-on-a-chip", i.e., integrated chemical and biochemical laboratories shrunk down to the size of a computer chip. An essential prerequisite for such labs are appropriate microcompartments for the confinement of very small amounts of liquids and chemical reagents. Directly accessible surface channels, which can be fabricated by available photolithographic methods, represent an appealing design principle for such microcompartments and, thus, provide a new route towards open microfluidic and nanofluidic systems. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, the Max Planck Institute of Dynamics and Selforganization and the University of California in Santa Barbara have shown that such open systems are possible in general but only if the geometry of the surface channels is carefully matched with their wettability (PNAS 102, 1848-1852 (2005).
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