Microfluidic Systems for Marine Biotechnology

During the past decade, rapid progress in physics, electronics, and material sciences has facilitated the development of miniaturized microfluidic systems, also known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC ), that represent the next generation of analytical laboratories, miniaturized to be held in one’s hand. Microfluidics has appeared as a concrete alternative than can address problems and overcome limitation in various biological and chemical domains, including stem cell research, drug discovery, and food sciences just to name a few, and has proven to be more than state-of-the-art techniques. Microfluidic techniques provide accurate and fast results with small amounts of reagents and can bring various analytical tools for in situ studies. In this chapter, we describe some of the systems developed to overcome the limitations of conventional marine biotechnology processes.