Electro-manipulation of biological cells in microdevices

Electric fields are used to manipulate biological cells for diverse applications that include cell counting and sorting, gene delivery, and the creation of novel hybrid cell-types. Although several of these techniques have established applications, others are less studied and are underutilized. Here, we briefly review several electro-manipulations that we achieved using electric fields generated by a common set of inert planar microelectrodes. We supplement our results with selected examples from the literature, and discuss their potential use within miniaturized platforms for single cell science.