Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Nat Commun. 2013;4:1625. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2653.
Most bioparticles, such as red blood cells and bacteria, are non-spherical in shape. However, conventional microfluidic separation devices are designed for spherical particles. This poses a challenge in designing a separation device for non-spherical bioparticles, as the smallest dimension of the bioparticle has to be considered, which increases fabrication challenges and decreases the throughput. If current methods do not take into account the shape of non-spherical bioparticles, the separation will be inefficient. Here, to address this challenge, we present a novel technique for the separation of red blood cells as a non-spherical bioparticle, using a new I-shaped pillar arrays design. It takes the shape into account and induces rotational movements, allowing us to leverage on the largest dimension, which increases its separation size. This technique has been used for 100% separation of red blood cells from blood samples in a focused stream, outperforming the conventional pillar array designs.
大多数生物粒子，如红细胞和细菌，都是非球形的。然而，传统的微流控分离设备是为球形颗粒设计的。这给非球形生物粒子的分离设备的设计带来了挑战，因为必须考虑生物粒子的最小尺寸，这增加了制造难度并降低了通量。如果当前的方法不考虑非球形生物粒子的形状，分离将是低效的。在这里，为了解决这个挑战，我们提出了一种新的技术，用于使用新型 I 形柱阵列设计分离作为非球形生物粒子的红细胞。它考虑到了形状，并诱导了旋转运动，使我们能够利用最大尺寸，从而增加了其分离尺寸。该技术已用于从聚焦流中的血液样本中 100%分离红细胞，优于传统的柱阵列设计。
