Development of a Single Cell Trapping Microfluidic Device

L. Weng [1], F. Ellett [1], J. F. Edd [1], M. Toner [1,2],
[1] Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
[2] Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston, MA, USA
发布日期 2016

Array-based technologies are important for many applications in drug discovery, microbiology and cell biology. A large-scale array of single cells allows high-throughput monitoring of behaviors of individual cells in parallel, avoiding the lack of cell specificity inherent to bulk measurement methods. Here, we designed a passive-pumping microfluidic device for trapping cells in an array and used the COMSOL Multiphysics® software to simulate the velocity field of the laminar flow within the device. Our results show that 93.5% of the traps were occupied by cells and 71.0% of all the traps captured only a single cell. The single cell trapping microfluidic device developed here can be useful in experiments requiring monitoring of single cells, due to its high efficiency and the ease of operation.

下载