Hydrophoretic high-throughput selection of platelets in physiological shear-stress range

Abstract

A gentle, but fast means for low-stress, high-throughput platelet purification is of significant clinical and biotechnological utility. Current implementations to sort platelets, however, require an external physical field, specialized buffer, or the harsh separation condition of high shear stress that tends to cause platelet stimulation. Here we report the use of hydrophoretic size separation in a wider channel and its parallelization to augment its throughput capability, maintaining physiological shear-stress range. We demonstrate a parallelized device comprising 10 stacks of the wide-channel hydrophoresis device, yielding a throughput of 2.9 million cells s(-1) and a platelet purity of 76.8%. The use of the wide channel for hydrophoresis also facilitates clogging-free separation by sorting blood clots and plaques. The wide-channel hydrophoresis offers the potential for gentle, fast, clogging-free sorting of rare blood cells with extreme throughput capabilities.

Principles of transverse flow fractionation of microparticles in superhydrophobic channels

“…A general conclusion from this plot is that the predictions of the simplified theory, Eq. (11), are in good agreement with numerical results (see Appendix A). Finally, we study the effect of gravity on the lateral displacements, by using two inclination angles of β = 25 • and 45 • .…”

Microfluidic device for sheathless particle focusing and separation using a viscoelastic fluid

“…1(b). Since it has only one inlet, it is capable of easy parallelized processing by having several layers of microchannels stacked together [29]. The initial cross-sectional dimensions of the 1st and 2nd stages were 45 m × 45 m (width × height) and 40 m × 45 m, respectively.…”

Hydrodynamic repulsion of spheroidal microparticles from micro-rough surfaces

“…Usual design considers smooth plane wall. Roughness-induced transport properties, such as super-hydrophobicity and transverse flow generation, are being intensively implemented in microfluidics nowadays [25–27]. For instance, recently micro-scale roughness and grooved surfaces have been proposed to separate inertial particles [28].…”