Issue 22, 2015

Highly efficient single cell arraying by integrating acoustophoretic cell pre-concentration and dielectrophoretic cell trapping

Abstract

To array rare cells at the single-cell level, the volumetric throughput may become a bottleneck in the cell trapping and the subsequent single-cell analysis, since the target cells per definition commonly exist in a large sample volume after purification from the original sample. Here, we present a novel approach for high throughput single cell arraying by integrating two original microfluidic devices: an acoustofluidic chip and an electroactive microwell array. The velocity of the cells is geared down in the acoustofluidic chip while maintaining a high volume flow rate at the inlet of the microsystem, and the cells are subsequently trapped one by one into the microwell array using dielectrophoresis. The integrated system exhibited a 10 times improved sample throughput compared to trapping with the electroactive microwell array chip alone, while maintaining a highly efficient cell recovery above 90%. The results indicate that the serial integration of the acoustophoretic pre-concentration with the dielectrophoretic cell trapping drastically improves the performance of the electroactive microwell array for highly efficient single cell analysis. This simple and effective system for high throughput single cell arraying with further possible integration of additional functions, including cell sorting and downstream analysis after cell trapping, has potential for development to a highly integrated and automated platform for single-cell analysis of rare cells.

Graphical abstract: Highly efficient single cell arraying by integrating acoustophoretic cell pre-concentration and dielectrophoretic cell trapping

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
08 Sep 2015
Accepted
23 Sep 2015
First published
06 Oct 2015
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Lab Chip, 2015,15, 4356-4363

Author version available

Highly efficient single cell arraying by integrating acoustophoretic cell pre-concentration and dielectrophoretic cell trapping

S. H. Kim, M. Antfolk, M. Kobayashi, S. Kaneda, T. Laurell and T. Fujii, Lab Chip, 2015, 15, 4356 DOI: 10.1039/C5LC01065A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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