Microfluidics has been considered as a potential technology to miniaturize the conventional equipments and technologies. It offers advantages in terms of small volume, low cost, short reaction time and highthroughput. The applications in biology and medicine research and related areas are almost the most extensive and profound. With the appropriate scale that matches the scales of cells, microfluidics is well positioned to contribute significantly to cell biology. Cell culture, fusion and apoptosis were successfully performed in microfluidics. Microfluidics provides unique opportunities for rare circulating tumor cells isolation and detection from the blood of patients, which furthers the discovery of cancer stem cell biomarkers and expands the understanding of the biology of metastasis. Nucleic acid amplification in microfluidics has extended to single-molecule, high-throughput and integration treatment in one chip. DNA computer which is based on the computational model of DNA biochemical reaction will come into practice from concept in the future. In addition, microfluidics offers a versatile platform for protein-protein interactions, protein crystallization and high-throughput screening. Although microfluidics is still in its infancy, its great potential has already been demonstrated and will provide novel solutions to the high-throughput applications.
Subject to the diffraction limit, the resolution of conventional optical microscopy is constrained to about 200 and 500 nm in the lateral and axial planes, respectively. The advantage of optical microscopy in the life sciences over electronic microscopy, especially fluorescence microscopy, drives scientists to develop novel "hacks" to reach nanoscale resolutions by optical means. In this review, three aspects of the techniques are discussed: (1) lateral super-resolution; (2) axial super-resolution; (3) super-resolution in three dimensions. The principles of how the methods achieve the cross-barrier resolution are discussed, and recent advances in current techniques are described. With these methods, the use of fluorescence microscopy is growing quickly toward a new era: fluorescence nanoscopy that will reveal 2 orders of magnitude more information on cellular structure and dynamics.
