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The piggy says, "Pure.... adrenaline...."
and then he says, "Recent development in microchemical technology enables us to integrate even a complicated chemical system onto a small microchip [1–9]. Microchemical technology is applicable to a wide range of chemical processes, including analyses [2–5], bioassays [2,3,6], and chemical syntheses [7–9]. The merit of the microintegration is that we can use rapid, efficient, and sophisticated chemical technologies anytime and anywhere as the occasion demands. That is, mobile and high-performance analytical systems will be realized in the near future. We cannot deal with CW and biological weapons (BW) attacks by conventional huge and complicated analyzers in analytical centers, because samples must be transferred from the actual spot to laboratories and it usually takes hours or days for these machines to show the results of analyses. Microchemical chips are expected to make analyses in minutes or even shorter periods in the future. Now, on-chip integration of electrophoresis, mostly for genome technology, is the most popular topic in microchemical process research (Fig. 1a) [10]. Highly sensitive detection methods for extremely small amounts of samples are necessary for microchemical technology in general. In the onchip electrophoresis experiments, fluorescent labeling and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection are used in a highly sensitive detection method [11]. However, the variety of chemical and biological weapons is so wide that combinations of electrophoretic separation and LIF are incapable of covering all of them. The analytical methods for chemical and biological weapons must cover even neutral and nonfluorescent species. An integration methodology that can be applied to more diverse analytical and biosystems is demanded. Our research group has developed a more general methodology for microintegration of analytical systems (Fig. 1b) [12]. For this subject, microunit operation (MUO), continuous-flow chemical process (CFCP), multiphase laminar flow (MPLF), and thermal lens microscopy (TLM) are key elements of our methodology. MUO and CFCP are basic concepts for the integration of general chemical processes onto microchips [12]. Micro fluid control based on MPLF [13] and photothermal determination of nonfluorescent species using TLM [14] are fundamental technologies to realize MUO and CFCP.