Abstract
BioMEMS, the biological and biomedical applications of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), has attracted considerable attention in recent years and has found widespread applications in disease detection, advanced diagnosis, therapy, drug delivery, implantable devices, and tissue engineering. One of the most essential and leading goals of the BioMEMS and biosensor technologies is to develop point-of-care (POC) testing systems to perform rapid prognostic or diagnostic tests at a patient site with high accuracy. Manipulation of particles in the analyte of interest is a vital task for POC and biosensor platforms. Dielectrophoresis (DEP), the induced movement of particles in a non-uniform electrical field due to polarization effects, is an accurate, fast, low-cost, and marker-free manipulation technique. It has been indicated as a promising method to characterize, isolate, transport, and trap various particles. The aim of this review is to provide fundamental theory and principles of DEP technique, to explain its importance for the BioMEMS and biosensor fields with detailed references to readers, and to identify and exemplify the application areas in biosensors and POC devices. Finally, the challenges faced in DEP-based systems and the future prospects are discussed.
Highlights
Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), presented as an extended branch of the conventional semiconductor very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) technologies, are small length scale devices and structures that integrate mechanical and electrical elements [1,2]
We aim to provide a general introduction to the DEP technique, to explain its importance for the BioMEMS and biosensor fields by providing detailed references to readers, and to identify and exemplify the application areas in biosensors, LOC, and POC devices based primarily on the studies carried out in our group, BioMEMS Research Group, Middle East Technical University
In the studies of Labeed et al, doxorubicin and K562 leukemia cell line were chosen as chemotherapeutic and cell type, respectively. By inspiring from these studies and using the electrical properties of K562/doxR cells obtained in these studies, we modeled imatinib resistant and sensitive K562 cells to determine a crossover frequency value to sense the discrimination between these cells under continuous flow inside a microchannel
Summary
Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), presented as an extended branch of the conventional semiconductor very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) technologies, are small length scale devices and structures that integrate mechanical and electrical elements [1,2]. Integration with microfluidics and small-scale operation of LOC and μTAS instruments provides significant advantages, including efficient cell, molecule, and particle isolation and immobilization; smaller volume of sample and carrier usage; low reagent consumption; providing advanced transportation mechanisms; and high capability of integration of different parts such as mixers, micropumps, reaction chambers, separators, electrodes, channels, and detectors into a single device [63]. In order to efficiently transmit acoustic power to the fluid and to achieve successful operation in acoustic-based systems, material selection for the device and precise design of microchannel geometry are extremely critical [65,86] The electric field, another source field used in active manipulation techniques, is applied to control particle movements through electrokinetic mechanisms [75,81,87].
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