Stephen R. Quake

TL;DR: In this article, a rotary pump was used to overcome the slow diffusion process in two applications: surface binding and active mixing of reagents, and the reaction kinetics of a surface-binding assay was enhanced by nearly two orders of magnitude.

TL;DR: The power of miniaturization lies not only in achieving an economy of scale, but also in exploiting the unusual physics of fluid flow and mass transport on small length scales to realize precise and efficient assays that are not accessible with macroscopic tools.

TL;DR: Evaluated intraclonal mutation patterns identified clone-specific punctuated cytosine mutagenesis events, showed that most structural variants are acquired before SNVs, determined that KRAS mutations occur late in disease development but are not sufficient for clonal dominance, and identified clones within the same patient that are arrested at varied stages in B-cell development.

TL;DR: The results confirm that fetal DNA is shorter than maternal DNA, and the enrichment of fetal DNA by size selection, however, may not provide a dramatic increase in sensitivity for assays that rely on length measurement in situ because of a trade-off between the fetal DNA fraction and the number of molecules being counted.

TL;DR: No single method performed best across all criteria and significant differences in characteristics were observed; the choice of which amplifier to use will depend strongly on the details of the type of question being asked in any given experiment.