Microfluidic cell concentrator with a reduced-deviation-flow herringbone structure

Ji-Chul Hyun; Jongchan Choi; Yu-Gyung Jung; Sung Yang

doi:10.1063/1.5005612

Microfluidic cell concentrator with a reduced-deviation-flow herringbone structure

Biomicrofluidics. 2017 Sep 27;11(5):054108. doi: 10.1063/1.5005612. eCollection 2017 Sep.

Authors

Ji-Chul Hyun¹, Jongchan Choi¹, Yu-Gyung Jung², Sung Yang

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju 500-712, South Korea.
² Department of Biomedical Science and Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju 500-712, South Korea.

Abstract

In this study, a microfluidic cell concentrator with a reduced-deviation-flow herringbone structure is proposed. The reduced-deviation-flow herringbone structure reduces the magnitude of deviation flow by a factor of 3.3 compared to the original herringbone structure. This structure shows higher recovery efficiency compared to the original herringbone structure for various particle sizes at high flow rate conditions. Using the reduced-deviation-flow herringbone structure, the experimental results show a recovery efficiency of 98.5% and a concentration factor of 3.4× at a flow rate of 100 ml/h for all particle sizes. An iterative concentration process is performed to achieve a higher concentration factor for 10.2-μm particles and Jurkat cells. With two stages of the concentration process, we were able to achieve over 98% recovery efficiency and a concentration factor of 10-11×. Cell viability was found to be above 96% after iterative concentration. We believe that this device could be used to concentrate cells as a preparatory step for studying low-abundance cells.