Shin Yong-Jun: Digital Microfluidics for Systems Biology

This book is a modified version of the author s thesis, ‘EWOD-based Digital Microfluidics as a Novel Platform for Systems Biology . The author, having mastered both medicine and engineering, believes the real challenge in science and engineering today is integration . For true integration, it is important for an individual to have basic knowledge about many different fields. However, having the knowledge is not enough, since integration is not simply adding things. Creative thinking is equally critical, for integration is a way of creating novel features or paradigms, which are often incomprehensible before the integration. One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate such integration of various fields (digital microfluidics, systems biology, high-throughput imaging, machine vision, state machine, etc). Another goal is to introduce state machine-based gene transcription network modeling, which is not included in the thesis. It is a novel way of modeling complex gene regulation networks, and the author believes it has potential of revolutionizing genomics and shows the direction in which future systems biology should move forward.