Advances in Single Cell Impedance Cytometry for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Microfluidics impedance cytometry is an emerging research tool for high throughput analysis of dielectric properties of cells and internal cellular components. This label-free method can be used in different biological assays including particle sizing and enumeration, cell phenotyping and disease diagnostics. Herein, we review recent developments in single cell impedance cytometer platforms, their biomedical and clinical applications, and discuss the future directions and challenges in this field.

High-throughput electrical position detection of single flowing particles/cells with non-spherical shape

“…It is lower for the erythrocytes than for the beads, which is consistent with the capacitive behaviour of an intact cell membrane. 49,50…”

Electrical measurement of cross-sectional position of particles flowing through a microchannel

“…Impedance-based microfluidic devices have been extensively studied in the last decade due to their simplicity and potential for low-cost and portable implementation. In particular, microfluidic impedance cytometers for label-free analysis of single particles and cells at high throughput (Cheung et al 2010;Sun and Morgan 2010;Petchakup et al 2017) have been used in different biological assays, including particle sizing and counting, cell phenotyping and disease diagnostics [e.g. Haandbaek et al (2016), McGrath et al (2017), Rohani et al (2017), Esfandyarpour et al (2017) and Rollo et al (2017)].…”

A simple electrical approach to monitor dielectrophoretic focusing of particles flowing in a microchannel

“…The basic principle comes from microfluidic impedance cytometry, a label‐free technique for the electrical characterization of particles and cells (see e.g. the reviews ). In a typical impedance chip, suspended particles flow through a microchannel and integrated electrodes are used to measure the variation in channel impedance induced by the passage of a particle.…”