Microfluidics and Macromolecules: Top-Down Analytics and Bottom-Up Engineering of Soft Matter at Small Scales.

Microfluidics is the art of creating and manipulating small portions of fluids. A typical variant of this art is fluid transport within small channels, either in form of laminar co-flow of miscible streams or in form of segmented-flow dripping and jetting of immiscible streams. Either method provides means to expose components of interest to defined local conditions such as spatially controlled concentration profiles that could not be established without the microfluidic auxiliaries. This ability renders microfluidics uniquely useful as both a method for advanced analytics and synthesis. This article sheds a spotlight on the use and utility of this method in macromolecular chemistry and physics. In this field, the synthetic aspect of microfluidics has been widely explored in macromolecular materials engineering, primarily by the use of droplets as templates to form various types of polymeric particles and capsules, whereas the analytical aspect has most prominently been employed for research on biopolymers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]