Electrical response of a B lymphoma cell line latently infected with Kaposi's sarcoma herpesvirus

Certain viruses, such as herpesviruses, are capable of persistent and latent infection of host cells. Distinguishing and separating live, latently infected cells from uninfected cells is not easily attainable using current approaches. The ability to perform such separation would greatly enhance the ability to study primary, infected cells and potentially enable elimination of latently infected cells from the host. Here, the dielectrophoretic response of B cells infected with Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) were investigated and compared to uninfected B cells. We evaluated the effect of applied voltage, signal frequency, and flow rate of the sample on the cell capture efficiency. We achieved 37.1% ± 8.5% difference in capture efficiencies between latently KSHV-infected and uninfected BJAB B lymphoma cells at the chip operational conditions of 1V, 50 kHz and 0.02 μl/min sample flow rate. Our results show that latently infected B lymphoma cells demonstrated significantly different electrical response compared to uninfected B cells and DEP-based microchips can be potentially used for sorting latently infected cells based on their electrical properties.