The aim of this field of activities within our department is the development and optimization of miniaturized thermocyclers in the chip format, which are used in performing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify selected DNA segments.

The advantages of using chip thermocyclers are:

• significantly shortened cycling times
• less power consumption for heating and cooling
• the ability of high sample throughput
• the reduced requirements of sample material and expensive analytic chemicals
  
  

The chip thermocyclers will find their application in a wide variety of fields including:

• diagnostics of mutations and carcinogenic effects as well as of infection diseases
• analyses and classification of plant pathogens
• analyses of contaminations in vaccine
  
  

According to the present demand on analyzers for research and clinical diagnostics with great mobility, low sample requirements and high sample throughput, the department Microfluidics is engaged in the development and construction of various thermocycling chip designs.
The chips are fabricated by micro machining based on the powerful
clean room equipment.

Currently two types of chip modules have been developed addressing different numbers of samples, sample volumes and processing flexibility. 

• stationary chip thermocycler with integrated real-time detection
• flow-through microchip reactors of different formats

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