Digital PCR can be performed manually, but it is labour-intensive, prone to pipetting errors and replication levels are limited by the format of plate used (i.e. 96 or 384 well). Alternative approaches to the multi-well plate method are now emerging. One of these is the use of a microfluidic sample handling system to split one sample into hundreds of individual reactions chambers which reside on an ‘integrated fluidic circuit’ or chip (Figure 2). This method also involves miniaturisation of the PCR whereby reactions are performed in nl volumes on the chip compared with ml volumes typically used in conventional PCR. This miniaturised process allows performance of close to 10000 individual PCR reactions per chip.