Microfluidic sorting of mammalian cells by optical force switching

Area of Science:

• Biotechnology
• Microfluidics
• Cell Sorting

Background:

• Microfluidic devices offer miniaturization and parallelism for biological assays.
• Developing practical microfluidic fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) remains challenging.
• Existing on-chip switch mechanisms struggle to meet high throughput, purity, and live cell recovery demands.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate optical forces for active cell routing in microfluidic devices.
• To implement and evaluate an all-optical switching fluorescence-activated microfluidic cell sorter.
• To achieve rapid, high-purity, and high-recovery cell sorting of live mammalian cells.

Main Methods:

• Utilized optical forces for rapid (2-4 ms) active control of cell routing on a microfluidic chip.
• Developed an all-optical switching mechanism to simplify chip complexity and connectivity.
• Evaluated the performance of the microfluidic cell sorter using live HeLa cells expressing histone-green fluorescent protein.

Main Results:

• Successfully implemented a fluorescence-activated microfluidic cell sorter using all-optical switching.
• Demonstrated rapid cell routing capabilities with optical forces.
• Recovered cell populations were verified as viable and unstressed through gene expression analysis (HSPA6 and FOS).

Conclusions:

• Optical forces provide an effective method for active cell routing in microfluidic cell sorting.
• All-optical switching offers a simplified and efficient approach for microfluidic FACS.
• This technology enables high-throughput, high-purity isolation of viable, unstressed mammalian cells.