TY - JOUR
T1 - Microfluidic deformability-activated sorting of single particles
AU - Choi, Gihoon
AU - Nouri, Reza
AU - Zarzar, Lauren
AU - Guan, Weihua
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1710831, 1902503, and 1912410. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. W.G. acknowledges support from the Penn State Startup Fund. The device fabrication was performed at Nanofab at Penn State.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - Mechanical properties have emerged as a significant label-free marker for characterizing deformable particles such as cells. Here, we demonstrated the first single-particle-resolved, cytometry-like deformability-activated sorting in the continuous flow on a microfluidic chip. Compared with existing deformability-based sorting techniques, the microfluidic device presented in this work measures the deformability and immediately sorts the particles one-by-one in real time. It integrates the transit-time-based deformability measurement and active hydrodynamic sorting onto a single chip. We identified the critical factors that affect the sorting dynamics by modeling and experimental approaches. We found that the device throughput is determined by the summation of the sensing, buffering, and sorting time. A total time of ~100 ms is used for analyzing and sorting a single particle, leading to a throughput of 600 particles/min. We synthesized poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogel beads as the deformability model for device validation and performance evaluation. A deformability-activated sorting purity of 88% and an average efficiency of 73% were achieved. We anticipate that the ability to actively measure and sort individual particles one-by-one in a continuous flow would find applications in cell-mechanotyping studies such as correlational studies of the cell mechanical phenotype and molecular mechanism.
AB - Mechanical properties have emerged as a significant label-free marker for characterizing deformable particles such as cells. Here, we demonstrated the first single-particle-resolved, cytometry-like deformability-activated sorting in the continuous flow on a microfluidic chip. Compared with existing deformability-based sorting techniques, the microfluidic device presented in this work measures the deformability and immediately sorts the particles one-by-one in real time. It integrates the transit-time-based deformability measurement and active hydrodynamic sorting onto a single chip. We identified the critical factors that affect the sorting dynamics by modeling and experimental approaches. We found that the device throughput is determined by the summation of the sensing, buffering, and sorting time. A total time of ~100 ms is used for analyzing and sorting a single particle, leading to a throughput of 600 particles/min. We synthesized poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogel beads as the deformability model for device validation and performance evaluation. A deformability-activated sorting purity of 88% and an average efficiency of 73% were achieved. We anticipate that the ability to actively measure and sort individual particles one-by-one in a continuous flow would find applications in cell-mechanotyping studies such as correlational studies of the cell mechanical phenotype and molecular mechanism.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41378-019-0107-9
DO - 10.1038/s41378-019-0107-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 34567626
AN - SCOPUS:85079319387
VL - 6
JO - Microsystems and Nanoengineering
JF - Microsystems and Nanoengineering
SN - 2055-7434
IS - 1
M1 - 11
ER -