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영어

The past 15 years have seen considerable progress in the development of microfabricated systems for use in the chemical and biological sciences. Interest in microfluidic technology has in large part been driven by concomitant advances in the areas of genomics, proteomics, drug discovery, high-throughput screening and diagnostics, with a clearly defined need to perform rapid measurements on small sample volumes. At a basic level, microfluidic activities have been stimulated by the fact that physical processes can be more easily controlled when instrumental dimensions are reduced to the micron scale. The relevance of such technology is significant and characterized by a range of features that accompany system miniaturization. Such features include the ability to process small volumes of fluid, enhanced analytical performance, reduced instrumental footprints, low unit costs, facile integration of functional components within monolithic substrates and the capacity to exploit atypical fluid behaviour to control chemical and biological entities in both time and space. Based on these advantageous characteristics, microfluidic systems have been used to good effect in a wide variety of applications including nucleic acid separations, protein analysis, process control, small-molecule synthesis, DNA amplification, immunoassays, DNA sequencing, cell manipulations, nanomaterial synthesis and medical diagnostics. The exploitation of microdroplets produced within microfluidic environments has recently emerged as a new and exciting technological platform for many. Microfluidic systems that generate and utilize a stream of sub-nanolitre droplets dispersed within an immiscible continuous phase have the advantage of allowing ultra high-throughput experimentation and being able to mimic conditions similar to that of a single cell thereby compartmentalizing biological and chemical reactions. Moreover, since they are isolated from channel surfaces and other droplets, each one acts as an individual reaction vessel. Variation of the cross-sectional dimensions of microchannels can be used to regulate droplet volumes, and flow rate variation allows control of reagent concentrations. Importantly, droplets can be generated at kHz frequencies, meaning that millions of individual reactions can be processed in very short times. We have developed a range of functional components and techniques for use in such systems. These include tools for droplet generation, droplet merging, droplet dilution, droplet splitting and phase separation. These tools can then be integrated to address key problems in the fields of genetics, proteomics, high-throughput screening and cellular analyses. My lecture will describe recent studies in all the above areas.