Many chemical and biomedical experiments are conducted
in labs that need a lot of space, expensive machinery and
special substances. What if this process could fit onto a tiny
chip? Wouldn?t that save a lot of time, space and money!
So-called ?labs-on-a-chip? (also called biochips) already exist
but their design is tedious. Researchers still have to manually
calculate a lot of the variables, which leads to the creation
of lots of different possible chips, some of which won?t prove
useful. This ?trial-and-error? approach takes a lot of time
and money. What if we could create a virtual biochip before
we physically make one ? so that we know we are always
manufacturing the right one? Here we developed a computer
simulation for a lab-on-a-chip and compared its predictions
to existing biochips. We found out that our approach is great
at its predictions, and chip designers could use it to create
reliably useful biochips for lots of different experiments.
Forschungs-