Piezoelectric Microchip for Cell Lysis through Cell–Microparticle Collision within a Microdroplet Driven by Surface Acoustic Wave Oscillation

Abstract

Cell lysis is an important and crucial step for the detection of intracellular secrets. Usually, cell lysis is based on strong ultrasonic waves or toxic chemical regents, which require a large amount of cell suspension. To obtain high efficiency cell lysis for a small amount of sample, a mechanical cell lysis method based on a surface acoustic wave (SAW) microchip is proposed. The microchip simply consists of a piece of LiNbO3 crystal substrate, interdigitated transducers (IDTs) with 80 pairs of parallel electrodes and 3M Magic Tapes. The modulated input electrical signal is coupled into the substrate through IDTs, which produces an acoustic stream in the droplet on the surface of a substrate. When a biofluid droplet containing cells and microparticles is dropped on the surface of the microchip, the cells and microparticles are accelerated and collide with each other. The fluorescence staining results illustrate that the cell membrane is efficiently destroyed and that proteins as well as nucleic acids inside the cell are released. The experimental results show that this method has a high efficiency and low sample consumption. The potential application is the pretreatment of a small amount of tested sample in a hospital or biolab.

A star shaped acoustofluidic mixer enhances rapid malaria diagnostics via cell lysis and whole blood homogenisation in 2 seconds

“…23,24 Although SAW devices benefit from precise frequency control, BAW microfluidics provides advantages such as higher throughput, facile and cost effective fabrication. 21,25 For instance, while SAW devices were demonstrated for cell lysis, by colliding cells to nanowires 26,27 at throughputs in the order of 1-20 μL min −1 using chemical reagents, 10,28,29 or using static fluid volumes, 30 BAW microfluidics have the potential of being operated at high flow rates without the need for any reagents or additional lysis assistance. For example, recently, vibrating PDMS based sharp edged structures were demonstrated to effectively lyse blood cells with an exposure time of approximately 20 min.…”

Emerging on-chip surface acoustic wave technology for small biomaterials manipulation and characterization

“…Instead of fabricating fixed microstructures, Wang et al added microparticles to the droplet containing cells to increase the collision likelihood that would break the cells apart. 35 The effective size of the microparticles was around 4-5 µm which resulted in a higher cell-microparticle collision frequency compared to particle sizes that are smaller (0.1 µm) or larger (15 µm). Overall, all these SAWbased techniques are capable to lyse cells up to 100% efficiency.…”

Biological Effects and Applications of Bulk and Surface Acoustic Waves on In Vitro Cultured Mammal Cells: New Insights

“…Single-cell manipulation is a rising field at the intersection of biological sciences, microfluidics, and acoustics. SAW can be used to facilitate cell collision with nanoparticles and to induce cell lysis in very small volumes in microfluidic systems [60]. SAW can also guide cell seeding further into porous scaffolds than non-exposed cells [53,61].…”