Rapid prototyping of microfluidic chips for dead-volume-free MS coupling

A fast and straightforward method to prototype microfluidic chip systems for dead-volume-free hyphenation to electrospray-ionisation mass spectrometry is presented. The developed approach based on liquid-phase lithography provides an inexpensive and reliable access to microfluidic chips for MS coupling which can be manufactured in any laboratory with low technical demands. The rapid prototyping approach enables the seamless integration of capillaries serving as electrospray emitters with negligible dead volume. The high versatility of the presented prototyping method and the applicability of a variety of chip-based devices in different fields of lab-on-a-chip technology are established for analytical separations by means of chip-electrochromatography–MS and for continuous-flow synthesis using microreactor technology with MS detection.