Microfluidics for protein biophysics

Microfluidics has the potential to transform experimental approaches across the life sciences. In this review, we discuss recent advances enabled by the development and application of microfluidic approaches to protein biophysics. We focus on areas where key fundamental features of microfluidics open up new possibilities and present advantages beyond low volumes and short time-scale analysis, conventionally provided by microfluidics. We discuss the two most commonly used forms of microfluidic technology, single-phase laminar flow and multiphase microfluidics. We explore how the understanding and control of the characteristic physical features of the microfluidic regime, the integration of microfluidics with orthogonal systems and the generation of well-defined microenvironments can be used to develop novel devices and methods in protein biophysics for sample manipulation, functional and structural studies, detection and material processing