Issue 5, 2021

Faster, better, and cheaper: harnessing microfluidics and mass spectrometry for biotechnology

Abstract

High-throughput screening technologies are widely used for elucidating biological activities. These typically require trade-offs in assay specificity and sensitivity to achieve higher throughput. Microfluidic approaches enable rapid manipulation of small volumes and have found a wide range of applications in biotechnology providing improved control of reaction conditions, faster assays, and reduced reagent consumption. The integration of mass spectrometry with microfluidics has the potential to create high-throughput, sensitivity, and specificity assays. This review introduces the widely-used mass spectrometry ionization techniques that have been successfully integrated with microfluidics approaches such as continuous-flow system, microchip electrophoresis, droplet microfluidics, digital microfluidics, centrifugal microfluidics, and paper microfluidics. In addition, we discuss recent applications of microfluidics integrated with mass spectrometry in single-cell analysis, compound screening, and the study of microorganisms. Lastly, we provide future outlooks towards online coupling, improving the sensitivity and integration of multi-omics into a single platform.

Graphical abstract: Faster, better, and cheaper: harnessing microfluidics and mass spectrometry for biotechnology

Article information

Article type
Review Article
Submitted
18 5月 2021
Accepted
01 7月 2021
First published
20 7月 2021
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

RSC Chem. Biol., 2021,2, 1331-1351

Faster, better, and cheaper: harnessing microfluidics and mass spectrometry for biotechnology

N. S. Ha, M. de Raad, L. Z. Han, A. Golini, C. J. Petzold and T. R. Northen, RSC Chem. Biol., 2021, 2, 1331 DOI: 10.1039/D1CB00112D

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements