New paradigms in the study of genomics (1), proteomics (2), immunology (3), neuroscience (4), and drug discovery (5) require that ever smaller quantities of analytes be separated in increasingly large numbers of samples. For example, more than 10,000 separations/day on nanogram quantities of material will be needed in the pharmaceutical industry to support drug discovery based on combinatorial chemical libraries and compound banks. At issue is how this will be doen. Microseparation systems are of great interest because miniaturization ahs the great advantage i) of increasing the probability of recovering microfractions for further analysis and characterization and ii) allowing multiple, parallel processing separation systems to be built that could increase the rate of research and discovery.
展开▼
