A wide variety of microfluidic devices of disparate, and often incompatible, design have been developed over the past 10-20 years, often with the goal of reducing sample volume requirements in bioanalytical methods. In the absence of standards controlling external dimensional form factors, the nature of the upstream and downstream external interface, and the length, cross-sectional geometry, and diameter of the internal microfluidic pathways, such microfluidic devices often prove incompatible with one another and with existing upstream purification and downstream analytical devices.
Despite advances in microfabrication, making possible analysis at microliter, even nanoliter or picoliter, scale, many biological and environmental samples are first acquired in volumes far greater than, and incompatible with, the scale of existing microfluidic analytical devices.
There is thus a need in the art for modular microfluidic components that can be used as components of integrated fluidic systems, and that can interface microfluidic components having different external dimensional form factors, external interfaces, and/or internal fluidic geometries, into effective fluidic communication, and that can interface preparative modules, or methods, that operate at larger scale with microfluidic preparative and/or analytical components.