Recent advances in microfluidic devices for bacteria and fungus research

Microorganisms are not only common pathogens in clinical practice, but also an important participant in the maintenance of ecological balance, which plays a vital role in food production, microbial industry, and biomedical research etc. The traditional methods for bacterial and fungi research are time-consuming, high-cost, accurate operation required and unable to realize single-cell analysis. Microfluidic technologies have been applied to microorganism studies recently. Microfluidic devices with micro-sized scale and large-scale integration offer many special benefits including low cost, high throughput, and high efficiency in microorganism analysis. In this paper, we review the development and applications of microfluidic devices with respect to bacteria and fungus, and emphasize the advantages over traditional methods. Most crucially, we discuss how microfluidic chip technology contributes to the study of bacteria, fungus and their interactions. Finally, we provide insights into the challenges of bacterial and fungi studies based on microfluidic chip and present future perspectives. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.