Microfluidic devices for sample pretreatment and applications

With the fundamentals of microscale flow and species transport well developed, the recent trend in microfluidics has been to work towards the devices capable of dealing with ‘real’ crude samples directly. Before the real samples reaching the analytical step, it nearly requires significant pre-treated steps. Development of these microdevices that perform sample preprocessing steps is now underway for a broad range of application areas from on-chip DNA analysis, immunoassays to cytometry. This article provides an overview of the latest developments in microfluidic devices for sample pretreatment. Many of the microchips are being designed for individual preprocessing steps, but integration of multiple sample preparation steps has been shown, along with integration of sample preprocessing and analytical procedures on single microchips.