Label-free particle and cell sorting based on inherent physical properties

11.11.2019 von 16:00 bis 17:00

Cell sorting is a key tool in medicine and biology to find and characterize cells of interest. Whereas standard immune-labelling is a powerful technique combined with for example fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS), it does require expensive and sensitive equipment and reagents. Instead, we rely on the inherent physical properties of cells to avoid any need for labelling, and by implementing our sorting schemes on microfluidics platforms we make the preparation and analysis of a sample simpler, more widely accessible and cheaper.

In our laboratory we pioneered morphology, density and deformability-based sorting using deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) [1, 2] [3]. We characterized the mechanical and morphological properties of different variants of red blood cells as well as cancer cells and bacteria. We demonstrated the sorting of bacterial chains of different lengths[4], which is relevant due to the dependence of the morphology on virulence. We have been looking into nanoscale particles with our aims focused on extracellular vesicles. By combining the DLD with electrokinetics, we can tune the separation and sort particles that are close to 100nm [5].

Overall, we try to develop novel sorting schemes that rely on the inherent properties of the particles. This way we not only simplify the sorting but also open up for novel sorting parameters that are not accessible using standard approaches.

1.         Beech, J.P., et al., Sorting cells by size, shape and deformability. Lab on a Chip, 2012. 12(6): p. 1048-1051.

2.         Holm, S., J.P. Beech, and J.O. Tegenfeldt. Combined Density and Size-Based Sorting in Deterministic Lateral Displacement Devices. in microTAS2013. 2013.                       Freiburg, Germany: Society for Chemistry and Micro-Nano Systems.

3.        Holm, S.H., et al., Simplifying microfluidic separation devices towards field-detection of blood parasites. Analytical Methods, 2016. 8: p. 3291-3300.

4.         Beech, J.P., et al., Separation of pathogenic bacteria by chain length. Analytica Chimica Acta, 2018. 1000: p. 223-231.

5.         Beech, J.P., et al., Active Posts in Deterministic Lateral Displacement Devices. Advanced Materials Technologies, 2019. 4(9): p. 1900339.

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