Using bacteria to build settlements on Mars

In collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), a team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has developed a sustainable method for making bricks out of Martian soil, using bacteria ...

Optical vacuum cleaner can manipulate nanoparticles

Scientists at Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with Russian and international colleagues developed the concept for constructing an "optical vacuum cleaner." Due to its optical properties, it can trap nanoparticles from ...

Using waves to move droplets

Controlling individual droplets leads to more efficient self-cleaning surfaces and lab-on-a-chip implementations. University of Groningen professor Patrick Onck and colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology have ...

Lab-on-a-chip helps search for human DNA at crime scenes

Thanks to the work carried out by University of Twente Ph.D. candidate Brigitte Bruijns, crime scenes can now be inspected on the spot for the presence of human DNA. In her Ph.D. thesis, she describes a lab-on-a-chip that ...

Makerspaces could enable widespread adoption of microfluidics

For more than a decade, scientists have publicized the potential of microfluidics to revolutionize the test and analysis of substances ranging from water to DNA. Thousands of journal articles have chronicled researchers' ...

page 1 from 9

Lab-on-a-chip

A lab-on-a-chip (LOC) is a device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single chip of only millimeters to a few square centimeters in size. LOCs deal with the handling of extremely small fluid volumes down to less than pico liters. Lab-on-a-chip devices are a subset of MEMS devices and often indicated by "Micro Total Analysis Systems" (µTAS) as well. Microfluidics is a broader term that describes also mechanical flow control devices like pumps and valves or sensors like flowmeters and viscometers. However, strictly regarded "Lab-on-a-Chip" indicates generally the scaling of single or multiple lab processes down to chip-format, whereas "µTAS" is dedicated to the integration of the total sequence of lab processes to perform chemical analysis. The term "Lab-on-a-Chip" was introduced later on when it turned out that µTAS technologies were more widely applicable than only for analysis purposes.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA