![]() They pointed out, that technical advances in microfluidic systems have been achieved, but microfluidics researchers do still have to attract biologists’ attention. This challenge was already recognised 14 years ago by Helene Andersson and Albert van den Berg asking the question “Where are the biologists?” and scientists have been trying to find a solution since then. Nevertheless, most of the biotechnologists are still not used to integrate microfluidic systems into their typical experimental procedures in a regular manner. Over the last decade expert’s statements have been similar: “The future for microfabricated fluidics devices-or the lab-on-a-chip-looks quite promising” ( Caicedo and Brady, 2016) or “Microfluidics, as an emerging technique, provides new approaches to precisely control fluidic conditions on small scales and collect data in high-throughput and quantitative manners” ( Bai et al., 2018). Nowadays, many start-ups offer specialised microfluidic solutions for different applications and scientific questions. The interest in lab-on-a-chip devices for their application in biotechnology has expanded rapidly over the past 10 years ( Oliveira et al., 2016 Marques and Szita, 2017 Bjork and Joensson, 2019). This lays the foundation for routine integration of microfluidic systems into biotechnology research procedures. We conclude that connecting microfluidics and biotechnology is not an impossible challenge and made seven suggestions to bridge the gaps between those disciplines. Our analysis revealed six major gaps, concerning the lack of interdisciplinary communication, mutual knowledge and motivation, methodological compatibility, technological readiness and missing commercialisation, which need to be bridged in the future. The analysis resulted in a discussion of potential “gaps” that can be responsible for the rare integration of microfluidics into biotechnological studies. Furthermore, a detailed analysis in the state-of-the-art use of microfluidics within biotechnology was conducted exemplarily for four emerging biotechnological fields that can substantially benefit from the application of microfluidic systems, namely the phenotypic screening of cells, the analysis of microbial population heterogeneity, organ-on-a-chip approaches and the characterisation of synthetic co-cultures. In this review, we highlight microfluidics’ offers and compare them to the most important demands of the biotechnologists. For many years, absent innovative, ground-breaking and “out-of-the-box” applications have been made responsible for the missing drive to integrate microfluidic technologies into fundamental and applied biotechnological research. Although microfluidic tools were increasingly used for different applications within biotechnology in recent years, a systematic and routine use in academic and industrial labs is still not established. Microfluidics and novel lab-on-a-chip applications have the potential to boost biotechnological research in ways that are not possible using traditional methods.
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