Hydrodynamic separation of cells utilizing insulator-based dielectrophoresis

The manipulation and discrimination of biological cells is essential to many biomedical applications. Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) trapping consists of insulating structures which squeeze the electric field in a conductive solution to create a non-uniform electric field. The pattern of insulating structure was designed to generate the region of high-electric field to trap cells with positive dielectrophoresis (e.g. dead mammalian cells at low frequency) at lower-flow-field region. However, the negative-dielectrophoretic cells (e.g. viable cells at low frequency) were repelled to the low-electric-field region where the velocity was higher. The cells with different dielectrophoretic response were therefore separated and could be collected. The simulation was numerically performed to investigate parameters of the design in the present study.