Dielectrophoresis based microfluidic chip for continuous label-free separation of cells

Abstract

A continuous label-free cell separation chip has been presented based on dielectrophoresis (DEP) utilizing the electrical properties of cells. The proposed microfluidic chip consists of three planar electrodes, where the positive DEP cells/particles were moved away from the central streamline while the negative DEP cell remained in the central streamline. DEP response were tested on polystyrene beads and HaCaT cells which showed different DEP response with varying frequency. It has been observed that beads showed n-DEP in the whole frequency range of 100 kHz to 5 MHz, while HaCaT cells showed a crossover from n-DEP to p-DEP at around 700 kHz. Finally, the label-free continuous separation efficacy has been tested by performing successful separation of beads and cells at 1 MHz.