All I want for Christmas….

Although it is quite early in the year to think about Christmas wishes, I would like in this Focus article to construct a wish-list of technological issues which I consider as being currently unsolved but with a significant potential for an improvement of the overall field of Lab on a Chip, as well as having large commercial impact. Having said this, one of my underlying hopes is that some of these problems may have been solved already, with me just being unaware of the facts. The chance that this might be the case is particularly high in microfluidics, as the multidisciplinary nature of this field means that although most participants (me presumably included) are quite broadly educated people, they lack the truly specialist knowledge of a single discipline. So I hope that somewhere out there the solutions to the problems described below are already available and someone will simply point them out to me. The reason for picking the following topics is quite simple: I have been encountering these problems often in my daily work and have not been able to come up with a (completely) satisfactory solution. So I am throwing them out at the community, a process nowadays, in modern innovation management, also called ‘‘crowd sourcing’’, 1,2 and hope for the best.