Pillar of Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372, Singapore.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vitctoria 3010, Australia.
Nano Lett. 2021 Aug 25;21(16):6835-6842. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c01827. Epub 2021 Aug 6.
Sorting of extracellular vesicles has important applications in early stage diagnostics. Current exosome isolation techniques, however, suffer from being costly, having long processing times, and producing low purities. Recent work has shown that active sorting via acoustic and electric fields are useful techniques for microscale separation activities, where combining these has the potential to take advantage of multiple force mechanisms simultaneously. In this work, we demonstrate an approach using both electrical and acoustic forces to manipulate bioparticles and submicrometer particles for deterministic sorting, where we find that the concurrent application of dielectrophoretic (DEP) and acoustophoretic forces decreases the critical diameter at which particles can be separated. We subsequently utilize this approach to sort subpopulations of extracellular vesicles, specifically exosomes (<200 nm) and microvesicles (>300 nm). Using our combined acoustic/electric approach, we demonstrate exosome purification with more than 95% purity and 81% recovery, well above comparable approaches.
细胞外囊泡的分选在早期诊断中有重要的应用。然而，目前的外泌体分离技术存在成本高、处理时间长、纯度低等问题。最近的研究表明，通过声和电场的主动分选是微尺度分离活动的有用技术，将这两种技术结合起来有可能同时利用多种力机制。在这项工作中，我们展示了一种使用电和声学两种力来操纵生物颗粒和亚微米颗粒进行确定性分选的方法，我们发现同时应用介电泳（DEP）和声波电泳力可以降低颗粒能够分离的临界直径。随后，我们利用这种方法对细胞外囊泡的亚群进行了分选，特别是外泌体（<200nm）和微泡（>300nm）。使用我们的联合声/电方法，我们展示了超过 95%的纯度和 81%的回收率的外泌体纯化，远远超过了可比的方法。
