A little goes a long way: Faster, safer and easier to control — chemical reactions in microreactors are taking off in the lab. Now industry is being seduced by the charms of the lab on a chip

摘要

A few years ago, a productive PhD student in Peter Seeberger's chemistry lab would run three or four experiments a day. Each would be a painstaking step towards optimized conditions for a new reaction — be it making a peptide or producing a sugar molecule for use in a possible vaccine. Since then, Seeberger's expectations have soared. Now his students have to work ten times as hard. The 120 reactions that formed the basis for one recent publication were completed in three afternoons.