Better Beer with Lab-on-a-Chip

Lab-on-a-chip technology, which uses semiconductor-like microfabrication techniques to build interconnected fluid reservoirs and pathways, has shown great promise in the biomedical field, particularly for cell assays such as those required for DNA analysis. Now there's a new application sure to improve mankind: brewing better beer.

A brewer who wants to produce good beer needs to have a lot of experience, but even then, success is not guaranteed. For an optimal result, the fermentation process must be interrupted at a certain point. Thus far, however, there has been no analytic system that can inform a master brewer continually of the alcohol content of the malt liquid or the stage the fermentation has reached at any given point. Instead, the brewer has to take frequent samples manually and analyze them.

That approach could be history. Siemens scientists in Karlsruhe, Germany, are working on the development of a mini-laboratory for breweries and other applications. Its operation can be integrated into the production process and, unlike previous analytic devices, it delivers data continually. The key component of this lab-on-a-chip is smaller than a credit card, which enables it to perform analyses in a very short period of time. Results are ready in about 3 min.

Siemens researchers have developed a microfluidic system — a lab-on-a-chip — that can be used to analyze beer fermentation, among other things. (Source: Siemens)

Siemens is now working on applying this technology to the continual monitoring of industrial processes. In cooperation with the Institute for Spectrochemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (ISAS, Dortmund, Germany), specialists have developed a microfluidic system that consists of tubes as thin as a human hair. The fluid to be tested is dripped into this analytic system at a rate of ~1 µL/min. Only a few nanoliters of this volume are diverted by an electric current into the separator section, which is only a few centimeters long. The new device, which is now being tested for its effectiveness in practice, can analyze several components of a given liquid sample in accordance with specific requirements. It could thus be used in the food and beverage industry as a tool for the rapid quality control of products. It could also be used in biotechnology, the pharmaceutical industry, and environmental technology.

For additional information on emerging technologies, go to www.semiconductor.net/emerging.