Wang Xiao, Zandi Matthew, Ho Chia-Chi, Kaval Necati, Papautsky Ian
BioMicroSystems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems, University of Cincinnati, 812 Rhodes Hall, ML030, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA.
Lab Chip. 2015 Apr 21;15(8):1812-21. doi: 10.1039/c4lc01462f.
In the past two decades, microfluidics has become of great value in precisely aligning cells or microparticles within fluids. Microfluidic techniques use either external forces or sheath flow to focus particulate samples, and face the challenges of complex instrumentation design and limited throughput. The burgeoning field of inertial microfluidics brings single-position focusing functionality at throughput orders of magnitude higher than previously available. However, most inertial microfluidic focusers rely on cross-sectional flow-induced drag force to achieve single-position focusing, which inevitably complicates the device design and operation. In this work, we present an inertial microfluidic focuser that uses inertial lift force as the only driving force to focus microparticles into a single position. We demonstrate single-position focusing of different sized microbeads and cells with 95-100% efficiency, without the need for secondary flow, sheath flow or external forces. We further integrate this device with a laser counting system to form a sheathless flow cytometer, and demonstrated counting of microbeads with 2200 beads s(-1) throughput and 7% coefficient of variation. Cells can be completely recovered and remain viable after passing our integrated cytometry system. Our approach offers a number of benefits, including simplicity in fundamental principle and geometry, convenience in design, modification and integration, flexibility in focusing of different samples, high compatibility with real-world cellular samples as well as high-precision and high-throughput single-position focusing.
在过去二十年中,微流控技术在精确排列流体中的细胞或微粒方面变得极具价值。微流控技术利用外力或鞘流来聚焦颗粒样本,面临着复杂仪器设计和通量有限的挑战。新兴的惯性微流控领域带来了单位置聚焦功能,其通量比以前高出几个数量级。然而,大多数惯性微流控聚焦器依靠横截面流动诱导的拖曳力来实现单位置聚焦,这不可避免地使设备设计和操作变得复杂。在这项工作中,我们展示了一种惯性微流控聚焦器,它使用惯性升力作为唯一驱动力将微粒聚焦到单个位置。我们展示了不同尺寸微珠和细胞的单位置聚焦,效率为95%-100%,无需二次流、鞘流或外力。我们进一步将该设备与激光计数系统集成,形成了一种无鞘流式细胞仪,并展示了以2200个微珠每秒的通量和7%的变异系数对微珠进行计数。细胞通过我们的集成流式细胞仪系统后可以完全回收并保持活力。我们的方法具有许多优点,包括基本原理和几何结构简单、设计、修改和集成方便、不同样本聚焦灵活、与真实细胞样本高度兼容以及高精度和高通量单位置聚焦。