Microfabricated liquid chromatography columns based on collocated monolithsupport structures

There is great interest today in massively parallel analytical strategies a s a way to accelerate the rate of discovery in biological research; among t hem being 'biochips' and 'laboratories-on-a-chip'. The concept in the 'chip ' approach is that minaturization will allow large numbers of operations to be performed in parallel in a small space, as in electronics. Proceeding w ith the semiconductor analogy, this paper demonstrates that in situ microma chining can be used to simultaneously fabricate millions of micrometer size , particle like structures in multiple liquid chromatography columns on a s ingle wafer. Reduction of this widely used bioanalytical tool to the nanoli ter volume, parallel processing, chip format is a significant step toward l aboratories-on-a-chip. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.