Fractionation characteristic evaluation in a squeezing-electric-field-type cell sorter

The purpose of this study is the development of a medical cell sorter. Cell sorters that are currently used were developed for research, but they have problems of high running cost or risk of infection in medicine. Here, we reduce operating costs by using a photolithography technique. This cell sorter uses dielectrophoretic force to act on non-charged particles in a non-uniform electric field, and the force increases in proportion to the gradient of the square of the field intensity. We utilized the stronger dielectrophoretic forces to act on cells by raising an electric field that was confined through applying a voltage to the solution of the complex dielectric constant, which was smaller than the surrounding wall, and therefore narrowed the shape of the fractionation. We confirmed that this cell sorter gave the slope of the probability of 27.8%. As a result, we showed that dielectrophoresis in this cell sorter could be used to distribute non-charged particles.