A continuous cell separation chip using hydrodynamic dielectrophoresis (DEP) process

Abstract

We present a high-throughput continuous cell separation chip using hydrodynamic dielectrophoresis (DEP) process. The continuous cell separation chip uses three planar electrodes in a separation channel, where the positive DEP cells are moved away from the central streamline while the negative DEP cells remain in the central streamline. In the experimental study, we use the mixture of viable (live) and nonviable (dead) yeast cells in order to obtain the continuous cell separation conditions. For the conditions of the electric fields frequency of 5 MHz and the medium conductivity of 5 μS/cm, the fabricated chip performs a continuous separation of the yeast cell mixture at the varying flow-rate in the range of 0.1–1 μl/min; thereby, resulting in the purity ranges of 95.9–97.3 and 64.5–74.3%, respectively, for the viable and nonviable yeast cells. The present chip demonstrates the constant cell separation performance for varying mixture flow-rates.