Abstract
We demonstrate extremely high-throughput microfluidic cell sorting by making a parallel version of the vortex-actuated cell sorter (VACS). The set-up includes a parallel microfluidic sorter chip and parallel cytometry instrumentation: optics, electronics and control software. The result is capable of sorting lymphocyte-sized particles at 16 times the rate of our single-stream VACS devices, and approximately 10 times the rate of commercial cell sorters for an equivalent procedure. We believe this opens the potential to scale cell sorting for applications requiring the processing of much greater cell numbers than currently possible with conventional cell sorting.
Highlights
The speed or throughput of conventional fluorescence-activated cell sorting has been a severe limitation for important applications, including cell therapy, liquid biopsy and high-throughput phenotypic screening
Conventional cell sorting originated from continuous inkjet printing technology, to sort particles by the electrostatic deflection of droplets created by the stimulation of the Plateau–Rayleigh instability of a pressurised stream ejected from a nozzle and into the atmosphere [4]
The purpose of this paper is to report the first working parallel vortex-actuated cell sorter (VACS) chip, consisting of 16 individual VACS devices operating asynchronously, showing how the cytometry instrumentation can be parallelized to work with such a chip
Summary
The speed or throughput of conventional fluorescence-activated cell sorting has been a severe limitation for important applications, including cell therapy, liquid biopsy and high-throughput phenotypic screening. Since the only common short name for this technology is the acronym “FACS” (fluorescence activated cell sorting), which is a trademark of Beckton, Dickenson and Company, we refer to the conventional technology instead by the acronym CICS (continuous inkjet cell sorting), which reflects the physical principle of droplet deflection and the origin of the technology, rather than the “fluorescence activation”, which is shared by many microfluidic cell sorters that use quite different mechanisms for particle deflection [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call