Fluidic and microfluidic tools for quantitative systems biology.

Understanding genes and their functions is a daunting task due to the level of complexity in biological organisms. For discovering how genotype and phenotype are linked to each other, it is essential to carry out systematic studies with maximum sensitivity and high-throughput. Recent developments in fluid-handling technologies, both at the macro and micro scale, are now allowing us to apply engineering approaches to achieve this goal. With these newly developed tools, it is now possible to identify genetic factors that are responsible for particular phenotypes, perturb and monitor cells at the single-cell level, evaluate cell-to-cell variability, detect very rare phenotypes, and construct faithful in vitro disease models.