Preface

Since the idea of microfluidic technology was proposed by Manz et al. in 1989, it has attracted great attention over the past two decades due to the many advantages over conventional laboratoryscale assays, such as small sample volumes, low production costs per microfluidic device, high throughput synthesis and screening of biological species and drug targets, parallel processing of samples, fast sampiing time, accurate and precise control of sample reagents, low power consumption and versatile format for integration of various detection schemes. Microfluidic technology has led to multidisciplinary research across such disciplines as chemistry, biology, engineering and physics. Particularly in bioanalytical chemistry, no longer is microfluidic technology just about the quantitation of certain anions and cations in clinical chemistry and the increasing of sample throughput and analysis speed in immunoassays, it is also involved in the cell growth, sequencing genes, isolating single molecules, cell sorting, treating single cells, and establishing a pointofcare diagnostics device. When ＂microfluidics＂ and the flood of molecular biology terminologies appear in the groundbreaking publications, we should be reminded that the bioanalysis on microfluidic chip has already been holding the helm for the microfluidics research field.

Since the idea of microfluidic technology was proposed by Manz et al. in 1989, it has attracted great attention over the past two decades due to the many advantages over conven-tional laboratory-scale assays, such as small sample vol-