FLUIDIGM.

FLUIDIGM Corp.; INTEGRATED circuits; MANUFACTURING industries; QUAKE, Stephen R.; PUMPING machinery; LITHOGRAPHY; POLYMERASE chain reaction; GENE amplification; PROTEINS

The article discusses Fluidigm and the release of the Topaz Crystallizer, a system that can very rapidly crystallize large numbers of proteins for the purpose of learning their structures. A start-up co-founded by Stephen R. Quake, a young professor of biophysics from the California Institute of Technology, continues to distinguish itself as a leader in the emerging field of microfluidics. The Topaz Crystallizer system can work with extremely small volumes of protein solutions, enabling many tests to be run in parallel. To build the microfluidic system, Quake used a novel lithography technique that constructs three-dimensional networks of microscopic channels, valves and reaction chambers. In September 2002 the company announced that it had employed a microfluidic valve technology, built using this so-called soft lithography method, to partition a sample into 20,000 polymerase chain reactions (gene amplifications), with the solution in each reaction holding less than a billionth of a liter.