Enhancing the Accuracy of Measuring DEP Force Applied on Cells by Considering the Friction Effect.

Biosensors (Basel)

Department of Animal Biotechnology, Reproductive Biomedicine Research Center, Royan Institute for Biotechnology, ACECR, Isfahan 8165131378, Iran.

Published: May 2023

AI Article Synopsis

  • The Dielectrophoresis (DEP) phenomenon is increasingly used for separating cells, but measuring the DEP force accurately has been challenging for scientists.
  • A new method proposed in this research accounts for the previously ignored friction effect by measuring the forces in two different microchannel alignments to determine the net DEP force.
  • Experimental results showed that this method provided more accurate DEP force measurements for white blood cells (42 pN) and sperm (3 pN) compared to traditional methods, leading to the conclusion that this innovative approach is reliable and applicable to various cell types.

Article Abstract

The Dielectrophoresis (DEP) phenomenon has been widely used for cell separation in recent years. The experimental measurement of the DEP force is one of the concerns of scientists. This research presents a novel method for more accurately measuring the DEP force. The innovation of this method is considered the friction effect, which has been neglected in previous studies. For this purpose, first, the direction of the microchannel was aligned with the electrodes. As there was no DEP force in this direction, the release force of the cells caused by the fluid flow equaled the friction force between the cells and the substrate. Then, the microchannel was aligned perpendicular to the direction of the electrodes, and the release force was measured. The net DEP force was obtained by the difference between the release forces of these two alignments. In the experimental tests, the DEP force, when applied to the sperm and white blood cell (WBC), was measured. The WBC was used to validate the presented method. The experimental results showed that the forces applied by DEP to WBC and human sperm were 42 pN and 3 pN, respectively. On the other hand, with the conventional method, these figures were as high as 72 pN and 4 pN due to neglecting the friction force. The compression between the simulation results in COMSOL Multiphysics and the experiments determined the new approach to be valid and capable of use in any cell, such as sperm.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10216049PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bios13050540DOI Listing

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