Electric fields are used to manipulate biological cells for diverse applications that include cell counting and sorting, gene delivery, and the creation of novel hybrid cell-types. Although several of these techniques have established applications, others are less studied and are underutilized. Here, we briefly review several electro-manipulations that we achieved using electric fields generated by a common set of inert planar microelectrodes. We supplement our results with selected examples from the literature, and discuss their potential use within miniaturized platforms for single cell science.
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