Successful development of a micro-total-analysis system (µTAS, lab-on-a-chip) is strictly related to the degree of miniaturization, integration, autonomy, sensitivity, selectivity, and repeatability of its detector. Fluorescence sensing is an optical detection method used for a large variety of biological and chemical assays, and its full integration within lab-on-a-chip devices remains a challenge. Important achievements were reported during the last few years, including improvements of previously reported methodologies, as well as new integration strategies. However, a universal paradigm remains elusive. This review considers achievements in the field of fluorescence sensing miniaturization, starting from off-chip approaches, representing miniaturized versions of their lab counter-parts, continuing gradually with strategies that aim to fully integrate fluorescence detection on-chip, and reporting the results around integration strategies based on optical-fiber-based designs, optical layer integrated designs, CMOS-based fluorescence sensing, and organic electronics. Further successful development in this field would enable the implementation of sensing networks in specific environments that, when coupled to Internet-of-Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), could provide real-time data collection and, therefore, revolutionize fields like health, environmental, and industrial sensing.

Understanding the behavior of a single particle flowing in a microchannel is a necessary step in designing and optimizing efficient microfluidic devices for the separation, concentration, counting, detecting, sorting, or mixing of particles in suspension. Although the inertial migration of spherical particles has been deeply investigated in the last two decades, most of the targeted applications involve shaped particles whose behavior in microflows is still far from being completely understood. While traveling in a channel, a particle both rotates and translates: it translates in the streamwise direction driven by the fluid flow but also in the cross-section perpendicular to the streamwise direction due to inertial effects. In addition, particles’ rotation and translation motions are coupled. Most of the existing works investigating the transport of particles in microchannels decouple their rotational and lateral migration behaviors: particle rotation is mainly studied in simple shear flows, whereas lateral migration is neglected, and studies on lateral migration mostly focus on spherical particles whose rotational behavior is simple. The aim of this review is to provide a summary of the different works existing in the literature on the inertial migration and the rotational behavior of non-spherical particles with a focus and discussion on the remaining scientific challenges in this field.