Experimental investigation of bulk response of cells on optoelectronic dielectrophoresis chip

The mechanism of the particle interactions is still inconclusive, even though many researchers have tried to figure out the particle-particle interactions under the influence of electric field. In this paper we report an experimental investigation of electrostatic attraction and repulsion of endothelial cells in an image-driven light induced dielectrophoresis (DEP) apparatus. The optoelectronic tweezers (OET) device consists of a planar structure having one or more portions which are photoconductive to convert incoming light to a change in the electric field pattern. When the cells are manipulated in OET chip at a frequency near the threshold of electrolysis, cells exhibits numerous interesting phenomena such as spinning, collision, rotation and pearl chain effect in three-dimensional (3D) space. All of these cell behaviors at such critical frequencies on this OET chip are reported.