Recent advances in acoustofluidic separation technology in biology

Yanping Fan; Xuan Wang; Jiaqi Ren; Francis Lin; Jiandong Wu

doi:10.1038/s41378-022-00435-6

Recent advances in acoustofluidic separation technology in biology

Microsyst Nanoeng. 2022 Sep 1:8:94. doi: 10.1038/s41378-022-00435-6. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Yanping Fan^#¹, Xuan Wang^#^{1

2}, Jiaqi Ren², Francis Lin³, Jiandong Wu²

Affiliations

¹ School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093 China.
² Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, 518055 China.
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2 Canada.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Acoustofluidic separation of cells and particles is an emerging technology that integrates acoustics and microfluidics. In the last decade, this technology has attracted significant attention due to its biocompatible, contactless, and label-free nature. It has been widely validated in the separation of cells and submicron bioparticles and shows great potential in different biological and biomedical applications. This review first introduces the theories and mechanisms of acoustofluidic separation. Then, various applications of this technology in the separation of biological particles such as cells, viruses, biomolecules, and exosomes are summarized. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future prospects of this field.

Keywords: Engineering; Materials science; Nanoscience and technology.

Publication types

Review