Abstract
Microfluidics and novel lab-on-a-chip applications have the potential to boost biotechnological research in ways that are not possible using traditional methods. Although microfluidic tools were increasingly used for different applications within biotechnology in recent years, a systematic and routine use in academic and industrial labs is still not established. For many years, absent innovative, ground-breaking and “out-of-the-box” applications have been made responsible for the missing drive to integrate microfluidic technologies into fundamental and applied biotechnological research. In this review, we highlight microfluidics’ offers and compare them to the most important demands of the biotechnologists. Furthermore, a detailed analysis in the state-of-the-art use of microfluidics within biotechnology was conducted exemplarily for four emerging biotechnological fields that can substantially benefit from the application of microfluidic systems, namely the phenotypic screening of cells, the analysis of microbial population heterogeneity, organ-on-a-chip approaches and the characterisation of synthetic co-cultures. The analysis resulted in a discussion of potential “gaps” that can be responsible for the rare integration of microfluidics into biotechnological studies. Our analysis revealed six major gaps, concerning the lack of interdisciplinary communication, mutual knowledge and motivation, methodological compatibility, technological readiness and missing commercialisation, which need to be bridged in the future. We conclude that connecting microfluidics and biotechnology is not an impossible challenge and made seven suggestions to bridge the gaps between those disciplines. This lays the foundation for routine integration of microfluidic systems into biotechnology research procedures.
Highlights
The interest in lab-on-a-chip devices for their application in biotechnology has expanded rapidly over the past 10 years (Oliveira et al, 2016; Marques and Szita, 2017; Bjork and Joensson, 2019)
Biotechnological interest in the application of microfluidics has expanded rapidly and numerous studies show the potential of microfluidic systems for biotechnological research
We discussed the inherent advantages of microfluidic systems (Figure 1) for their use in biotechnology and worked out the case-specific relevance in specific research fields
Summary
The interest in lab-on-a-chip devices for their application in biotechnology has expanded rapidly over the past 10 years (Oliveira et al, 2016; Marques and Szita, 2017; Bjork and Joensson, 2019). We exemplarily analyse four emerging biotechnological fields that tremendously benefit from the application of microfluidic systems, namely microbial heterogeneity studies, the screening of cells, the analysis of synthetic co-cultures and organ-on-a-chip approaches. Work of biotechnologists and of other experimental researchers is often limited by the accessibility of equipment, which imposes restrictions to their experimental design New technologies such as microfluidics should provide solutions for handling lab routines within a single device (lab-on-a-chip), which is affordable and can analyse various parameters per experimental run. Both studies exemplarily show how microfluidic single-cell tools can contribute to an improved understanding of microbial heterogeneity, which would not have been possible with conventional technologies Despite these examples of successful microfluidics application, a routine use has not been established. These examples indicate already the enormous future potential of microfluidics platforms as an experimental environment to study metabolite exchange, physical interaction, landscape colonisation and the impact of the microenvironment on co-culture (synthetic community) stability
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