The Influence Of The Spherical Cell Translational To The Chemical Environment In Microchannels

The microfluidic technology can produce temporal and spacial stableconcentration gradient, which benefits the quantitative investigation ofliving cell chemotaxis. To date, the study of chemotactic effect based onmicrofluidic device focused on two aspects. Firstly, generate desiredconcentration gradients which suit for different chemotactic responses.Secondly, investigate the concentration field near a stationary cell withvarious shape and size. These researches either assumed that theconcentration field was not affected by the existing cell, or ignored theimpact of cell motion. In this paper, we simulate the evolvement of theconcentration field around a moving sphere cell in a straight microchannel.By changing the Peclet number, the velocity of cell, the direction ofmovements, and the size of cell, we find that the deviation of themaximum concentration difference around a moving cell and a stationarycell at the same spot is close to a constant after a certain time of theuniform motion. Results show that this constant is a function of the Pecletnumber, the velocity of cell, the direction of movement, and the size of cell.So the maximum concentration difference around a moving cell can bereplaced by that of a stationary cell with corrections. This conclusion isvaluable to further quantitative chemotactic research.