High-Throughput Cell Trapping in the Dentate Spiral Microfluidic Channel

Jiawei Lu,Zhuoqing Yang,Bo Dai,Yangtai Guan,Dawei Zhang,Songlin Zhuang,Yongfeng Fu,Yan Long,Wenbin Wan,Shaoqi Huang,Junyi Chen,Lulu Zheng,Kan Wang

doi:10.3390/mi12030288

Abstract

Cell trapping is a very useful technique in a variety of cell-based assays and cellular research fields. It requires a high-throughput, high-efficiency operation to isolate cells of interest and immobilize the captured cells at specific positions. In this study, a dentate spiral microfluidic structure is proposed for cell trapping. The structure consists of a main spiral channel connecting an inlet and an out and a large number of dentate traps on the side of the channel. The density of the traps is high. When a cell comes across an empty trap, the cell suddenly makes a turn and enters the trap. Once the trap captures enough cells, the trap becomes closed and the following cells pass by the trap. The microfluidic structure is optimized based on the investigation of the influence over the flow. In the demonstration, 4T1 mouse breast cancer cells injected into the chip can be efficiently captured and isolated in the different traps. The cell trapping operates at a very high flow rate (40 μL/s) and a high trapping efficiency (>90%) can be achieved. The proposed high-throughput cell-trapping technique can be adopted in the many applications, including rapid microfluidic cell-based assays and isolation of rare circulating tumor cells from a large volume of blood sample.

Highlights

Cell trapping is a technique to isolate single cells or cell clusters of interest from a large group of cells and immobilize the target cells at a specific location for further cellular analysis
Cell trapping technique plays an important role in the various biomedical diagnosis and research fields, including cell-based assay, cellular heterogeneity analysis, cell-to-cell signaling study, drug screening and rare circulating tumor cell monitoring [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The flow carrying particles flows in the main channel

Summary

Introduction

Cell trapping is a technique to isolate single cells or cell clusters of interest from a large group of cells and immobilize the target cells at a specific location for further cellular analysis. The celltrapping techniques can be grouped into two categories based on cell-driven mechanisms, i.e., active trapping that applies an external force field to manipulate cells and passive trapping that harnesses a hydrodynamic effect to drive cells in the microfluidic structure. Optical trapping should operate at a relatively low and safe power range, but it is hard to sustain cells in the trap where the flow rate is high and the throughput is limited. Even if the operation is under a low acoustic power, an SAW tweezer can drive cells in the flow with an extremely high flow rate In most cell-trapping structures, traps are distributed in the way of the flow to intercept the incoming cells [24,25,26,27,28,29]. We demonstrate cell trapping of 4T1 mouse breast cancer cells in the microfluidic chip

2.1.Design

Cell Culture and Preparation

Results

Conclusions