Microfluidics for cell factory and bioprocess development

Bioindustry is expanding to an increasing variety of food, chemical and pharmaceutical products, each requiring rapid development of a dedicated cell factory and bioprocess. Microfluidic tools are, together with tools from synthetic biology and metabolic modeling, being employed in cell factory and bioprocess development to speed up development and address new products. Recent examples of microfluidics for bioprocess development range from integrated devices for DNA assembly and transformation, to high throughput screening of cell factory libraries, and micron scale bioreactors for process optimization. These improvements act to improve the biotechnological engineering cycle with tools for building, testing and evaluating cell factories and bioprocesses by increasing throughput, parallelization and automation.