Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, N. T., Hong Kong.
Biomicrofluidics. 2013 Oct 3;7(5):54112. doi: 10.1063/1.4821169. eCollection 2013.
The phenomenon of self-rotation observed in naturally and artificially pigmented cells under an applied linearly polarized alternating current (non-rotating) electrical field has been investigated. The repeatable and controllable rotation speeds of the cells were quantified and their dependence on dielectrophoretic parameters such as frequency, voltage, and waveform was studied. Moreover, the rotation behavior of the pigmented cells with different melanin content was compared to quantify the correlation between self-rotation and the presence of melanin. Most importantly, macrophages, which did not originally rotate in the applied non-rotating electric field, began to exhibit self-rotation that was very similar to that of the pigmented cells, after ingesting foreign particles (e.g., synthetic melanin or latex beads). We envision the discovery presented in this paper will enable the development of a rapid, non-intrusive, and automated process to obtain the electrical conductivities and permittivities of cellular membrane and cytoplasm in the near future.
已经研究了在施加的线性偏振交流电（非旋转）电场下观察到的天然和人工着色细胞中的自旋转现象。量化了细胞的可重复和可控制的旋转速度，并研究了它们对介电泳参数（例如频率、电压和波形）的依赖性。此外，还比较了具有不同黑色素含量的着色细胞的旋转行为，以量化自旋转与黑色素存在之间的相关性。最重要的是，吞噬细胞在施加的非旋转电场中最初不会旋转，但是在摄取外来颗粒（例如合成黑色素或乳胶珠）后，开始表现出与着色细胞非常相似的自旋转。我们设想本文所提出的发现将能够在不久的将来开发出一种快速，非侵入性和自动化的过程来获得细胞膜和细胞质的电导率和介电常数。
