Study On Dielectrophoresis Chips For High-throughput Continuous Flow Cell Separ Ation

Cell separation plays an important role in the fields of biochemical analysis and clinical medicine.Compared with traditional methods such as centrifugation,filtration,and flow cytometry,dielectrophoresis(DEP)cell separation is favored by researchers because of its advantages of label-free,less sample consumption,and easy integration.Existing dielectrophoretic cell separation studies are inadequate in terms of electrode structure design and processing technology,which cannot meet the simple,fast and low-cost requirements of processing technology while generating efficient dielectrophoretic forces.Aiming at the problems of low-throughput,time-consuming processing,and high cost of dielectrophoretic cell separation chips,this paper proposes a complete dielectrophoresis cell separation scheme.We cleverly combined the electrode structure design with low-cost and easy-to-operate conductive polymer electrode materials to achieve continuous high-throughput cell separation.First,a 3D electrode structure composed of the upper slide track and the lower cylinder is designed in this paper.The electrode can generate an efficient dielectrophoretic force in the entire channel depth,so that target cells are attracted to the side wall of the track electrode and then sliding along the track.This electrode achieves the separation of live and dead Hela cells with high concentration at a sample flow rate of 1 ml/h.In addition,we expanded the original electrode structure into a V-shaped electrode through a simple mirror combination,and isolated Hela cells from lymphocytes at a high flow rate of 1.2 ml/h(collection rate:80.4%).Secondly,in this study,soft lithography technology and conductive polymer AgPDMS were used to realize one-step molding of the electrode and the flow path structure,which was simple to operate while saving time and economic costs.Finally,we use image processing technology to automatic processing of experimental data.In this work,we performed functional tests on the designed chip and successfully applied it to continuous flow cell separation experiments with high concentration and high flow rate,which overcomes the shortcomings of the existing technology,such as low throughput and high cost.