Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 9: Soft Particles in Flows II (Focus session, joint DY, CPP)
DY 9.8: Talk
Monday, March 20, 2017, 17:15–17:30, ZEU 160
Non-inertial lift and its application to label-free microfluidic cell separation and sorting — T M Geislinger1,2, M Stamp1, B Eggart1, S Braunmüller1, L Schmid1, S Chan2, M Koll2, M Wahlgren2, A Wixforth1, and •T Franke1, 3 — 1Experimental Physics I, University of Augsburg, 86159 Augsburg, Germany — 2Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Box 280, S-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden — 3Chair of Biomedical Engineering, University of Glasgow, Oakfield Avenue, G12 8LT, Glasgow, Scotland
Reliable cell separation and sorting are important tasks in everyday's laboratory work and of increasing importance in various medical diagnoses. Widely used methods like fluorescence or magnetically activated cell sorting (FACS, MACS), however, require labelling of samples with adequate markers and/or the generation of external fields. Apart from the dimensions and the costs of such devices, any unwanted alterations of the cells by the markers potentially interfere with subsequent processes such as genetic analyses. Here, we present a simple and cheap microfluidic approach for continuous, passive and label-free cell sorting that relies on the exploitation of a hydrodynamic effect for separation: the non-inertial lift effect. The non-inertial lift effect is a repulsive cell-wall interaction of purely viscous origin that acts on non-spherical and deformable objects in laminar flow fields. Generally, the lateral drift becomes stronger for larger and more deformable objects. We examine this effect for separation of different cells including circulating tumor cells and malaria infected red blood cells.