Utilisation of micro- and nanoscaled materials in microfluidic analytical devices

Microfluidic devices are receiving an increasing attention from scientific community and commercial sphere especially due to their potential to be low-cost, portable and practical handy analytical devices requiring extremely low volumes of samples and producing reduced amount of waste. Recently, nano- and microscaled particles have found wide application in the fabrication of microfluidic devices thanks to their ability to improve analytical performance. This review covers recent papers describing analytical microfluidic devices benefiting from nanoparticles or microbeads. Interesting concepts utilising magnetic properties of such particles were also included. Possible applications of these devices on analysis of real samples were considered and discussed. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.