The undiscovered country: Ecotoxicology meets microfluidics

Abstract

Microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) technologies offer tremendous miniaturization capabilities and enable innovative ways of performing biotests without the need for conventional laboratory infrastructure. These miniaturized analytical technologies experience an explosive growth worldwide. However, there appears that one of the fields of biosciences namely ecotoxicology has so far largely escaped the attention of researchers working on chip-based systems. This is in very stark contrast to rapid adoption of microfluidics across biomedicine and many other fields of biomedicine. We postulate that innovative LOC technologies are poised to open a new avenue for inexpensive and, at the same time, high-throughput and content rich ecotoxicity test protocols. The development of novel chip-based technologies, capable of performing traditional tasks in a faster, more economical and precise manner, can particularly benefit a number of areas of aquatic ecotoxicology. This work aims to highlight microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip systems as promising new analytical technologies for aquatic ecotoxicology and water quality monitoring. We review currently existing state-of-the-art of these emerging field and provide future outlook on how aquatic ecotoxicology can benefit from adoption of microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip devices for accelerated bioanalysis.