Dear Colleagues,

As an emerging field, nanofluidics offers unique phenomena compared to well-established microscale devices. Most importantly, it gives an opportunity to investigate molecules closely at the single-molecule level. The continued development of microfluidic elements is clearly necessary to generalize the chemical processes for which they can be used. This development is underway in a large number of laboratories. Two specific directions of interest are Hybrid synthetic and living microfluidic devices that can act as long-term living sensors and Nanofluidic systems with a character size of less than a micrometer. In the development of hybrid synthetic and living microfluidic systems, the challenge is to tune the interplay between synthetic structure and imposed stimuli and the natural developmental processes of living cells. Nanofluidic systems are integrated microdevices with at least one component in the devices having length scales in the range of one to hundreds of nanometers. The critical dimension of nanofluidic systems is comparable to relevant length scales such as diffusion lengths of molecules, sizes of molecules and Debye screening lengths of electric double layers. Nanofluidic systems are ideally suitable for single-molecule detection because the systems have the capability of either constraining an individual molecule in a nanochannel for optical detection or providing electrical signals reflecting the presence of an individual molecule inside a nanochannel of the system.

We invite researchers to submit their original research as well as review articles that are fallen into the aforementioned scopes.