Shoveling Water

The new microfluidic chip fabricated by Fluidigm, a startup based in South San Francisco, represents a decade of successive inventions. This small square of spongy polymer--the same type used in contact lenses and window caulking--holds a complex network of microscopic channels, pumps, and valves. Minute volumes of liquid from, say, a blood sample can flow through the maze of channels to be segregated by the valves and pumps into nearly 10,000 tiny chambers. In each chamber, nanoliters (billionths of a liter) of the liquid can be analyzed.

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