**1.3. Advantages and selected applications of microfluidics**

The science and technology mentioned above are widely exploited and applied to give microfluidics a host of advantages. A brief list includes use of small volumes of sample and reagents (thus reducing cost per analysis and minimizing waste disposal); rapid sample processing; potential for automation (thus reducing cost); reduced risk of contamination; short analysis time (e.g., by increasing speed of separations); small footprint and light-weight thus enabling development of future portable microfluidic-based, portable micro-instruments that can be employed *on-site* or for personal use or for personal dosimetry; potential for massive parallelism (for high sample throughput); and overall, lower ownership and operating costs (vis-à-vis conventional, lab-sized systems). Application areas (to name but a few), include analytical chemistry, synthetic chemistry (including nanomaterials synthesis), microbiology, biotechnology, point-of-care diagnostics, drug delivery, immunoassays and medicine, health-monitoring and health-diagnostics, agriculture, food safety and environmental monitoring [30–47].
