LAUSR

Jörg P. Kutter Another year has passed, and microfluidics remains a heavily utilized enabling technology to realize novel and powerful analytical solutions in a miniaturized format. The diversity of solutions and applications is highlighted by the 15 original contributions collected in the 2018 edition of the Special Issue on Miniaturization. The topics covered reflect the crossdisciplinarity of this field, ranging from material and fabrication aspects, to fundamental fluidic and chemical phenomena, and to specific applications involving DNA, lipid bilayers, bacterial and other cells. We start off with three articles describing separation approaches on microdevices, followed by five papers on various aspects of detection, sensing and recognition for analytical purposes. The third group, which consists of three contributions, highlights basic concepts in working in miniaturized systems, in particular also aspects of droplet-based fluidics. Finally, we round of the special issues with four articles describing capturing, manipulation, culturing and analysis on different types of cells, including the potential to investigate individual cells using microfluidic devices. It has been our distinct pleasure to put this special issue together and we would like to thank all authors for their contributions, and already look forward to the next installment in this long-running series of special issues. We remain with our best wishes for a successful 2018, happy reading and lots of exciting science ahead! Franta Foret & Jörg Kutter