Cell Deformability Monitoring Chips Based on Orifice-Length-Dependent Digital Lysis Rates

It is the first proposal to monitor cell deformability based on the lysis rate difference measured from the cells passing through a filter array having gradually increased orifice length. Compared to the previous methods [ 1-4], the present chips offer simple and inexpensive monitoring with high sensitivity. In the experimental study, we use normal and chemically treated erythrocytes to verify the performance of the present chips. Using the fabricated chips, T-device and L-device measure the maximum lysis rate difference between the normal and the treated erythrocytes at the second filter, respectively having 6.7μm- and 4.3μm-long orifices. We achieved more than 40 times improvement in the ratio of the average signals for normal erythrocytes to that of chemically treated erythrocytes.