Dielectrophoretic characterization and isolation of jellyfish stinging capsules

Abstract

Jellyfish stinging capsules known as nematocysts are explosive, natural-injection systems with high potential as a natural drug-delivery system. These organelles consist of a capsule containing a highly folded thin needle-like tubule and a matrix highly concentrated with charged constituents that enable the tubule to fire and penetrate a target. For the purpose of using these nematocysts as drug delivery system it is first required to purify subpopulations from heterogeneous population of capsules and to investigate each subpopulation's distinct function and characteristics. Here, the nematocysts' dielectric properties were experimentally investigated using dielectrophoretic and electrorotational spectra with best fits derived from theoretical models. The dielectric characterization adds to our understanding of the nematocysts' structure and function and is necessary for the dielectrophoretic isolation and manipulation of populations. As expected, the effect of monovalent and divalent exchange cations resulted in higher inner conductivity for the NaCl treated capsules; this result stands in agreement with their relative higher osmotic pressure. In addition, an efficient dielectrophoretic isolation of different nematocyst subpopulations was demonstrated, paving the way to an understanding of nematocysts' functional diversity and the development of an efficient drug delivery platform.

Functional and proteomic analysis of Ceratonova shasta (Cnidaria: Myxozoa) polar capsules reveals adaptations to parasitism

“…This approach was preferred over common biochemical methods such as centrifugation or Percol gradients because it yielded relatively large numbers of intact capsules, while offering high controllability and ease of operation. DEP-chip has been applied widely in biomedical research, bacteria detection and cell separation and its potential for jellyfish nematocyst characterization has recently been shown 46 – 49 ; but, it had not been used previously for cnidarian fractionations. We demonstrated that polar capsules had a distinct pDEP response in specific frequency ranges, which enabled their successful isolation and concentration.…”

Review: Dielectrophoresis in cell characterization

“…6A). Having potential in drug delivery methods, this study aimed at characterizing these capsules for DEP separation [100]. In this study, they characterized larges capsules with both single‐ and two‐shell models (Fig.…”

“…The symbols are experimental measurements while the solid lines are the fitted two‐shell model. Reprinted with permission from [100], copyright 2017, John Wiley and Sons.…”

Dielectrophoresis velocities response on tapered electrode profile: simulation and experimental

“…The DEP manipulation is dependent on the polarization factor or the Clausius-Mossotti factor (CMF) of particle and on the medium interaction. Recently, the DEP method has been applied in microbiological research to isolation (Park et al, 2017;Cheng et al, 2015), concentration (Koklu et al, 2017;Hsiung et al, 2008) and localization (Kim et al, 2017;Kinio et al, 2017) of particles by implementing focusing (Nakano et al, 2011) and trapping (Chen et al, 2018) manipulation mechanism. Meanwhile, it is able to use for developing biosensor and biosensing on artificial microbeads (Han et al, 2017), biological cells (Iswardy et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2015) and pharmaceutical delivery (Li et al, 2017) applications.…”