Yu Yue, Wen Hui, Li Sihong, Cao Haojie, Li Xuefei, Ma Zhixin, She Xiaoyi, Zhou Lei, Huang Shuqiang
CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Faculty of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Front Microbiol. 2022 Aug 16;13:906979. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.906979. eCollection 2022.
The importance of the microbiome is increasingly prominent. For example, the human microbiome has been proven to be strongly associated with health conditions, while the environmental microbiome is recognized to have a profound influence on agriculture and even the global climate. Furthermore, the microbiome can serve as a fascinating reservoir of genes that encode tremendously valuable compounds for industrial and medical applications. In the past decades, various technologies have been developed to better understand and exploit the microbiome. In particular, microfluidics has demonstrated its strength and prominence in the microbiome research. By taking advantage of microfluidic technologies, inherited shortcomings of traditional methods such as low throughput, labor-consuming, and high-cost are being compensated or bypassed. In this review, we will summarize a broad spectrum of microfluidic technologies that have addressed various needs in the field of microbiome research, as well as the achievements that were enabled by the microfluidics (or technological advances). Finally, how microfluidics overcomes the limitations of conventional methods by technology integration will also be discussed.
微生物组的重要性日益凸显。例如，人类微生物组已被证明与健康状况密切相关，而环境微生物组则被认为对农业乃至全球气候有着深远影响。此外，微生物组可作为一个引人入胜的基因库，其中的基因编码着对工业和医学应用极具价值的化合物。在过去几十年里，人们开发了各种技术以更好地理解和利用微生物组。特别是，微流控技术在微生物组研究中展现出了自身的优势和突出地位。通过利用微流控技术，传统方法诸如低通量、耗时长和成本高的固有缺点正在得到弥补或规避。在本综述中，我们将总结一系列广泛的微流控技术，这些技术满足了微生物组研究领域的各种需求，以及微流控技术（或技术进步）所带来的成果。最后，还将讨论微流控技术如何通过技术整合克服传统方法的局限性。
