Tunable frequency resonant biosensors dedicated to dielectric permittivity analysis of biological cell cytoplasm

Abstract

This paper presents an improved design of resonant biosensor, dedicated to dielectric analysis on biological cells at microwave frequencies. Such sensor uses the capability of microwaves to penetrate inside biological cells in order to interact with their intracellular content. Hence, individual dielectric properties of the cell cytoplasm can be known and then used as a signature of the cell pathological state (living or dead, malignant or safe…). In this paper is introduced a continuously tunable frequency sensor prototype, able to perform an accurate dielectric analysis over at least a 1GHz bandwidth while keeping enough sensitivity to detect and analyze a single cell. As a proof of concept, permittivity measurements have been led on calibrated size polystyrene beads: achieved results show good agreement with expected permittivity values. Finally experiments on Glioblastoma cells will be presented.

Development of High Frequency Microfluidic Biosensors for Intracellular Analysis

“…The resulting permittivity value (2.8 ± 0.2) is a good agreement with data reported in the literature [8].…”

High-Resolution Dielectric Characterization of Single Cells and Microparticles Using Integrated Microfluidic Microwave Sensors

“…The estimated responsivity that relates the induced frequency change to the particle volume and Clausius-Mossotti factor is illustrated with dashed lines in Figure 4A with relative permittivity of polystyrene taken as 3 [61] We attribute the dominant factor behind the dispersion in the frequency shift data to be the vertical-position dependency of the microwave sensor response, as the Electric field distribution is non-uniform (Figure S1) [62,63]. To support this claim, we repeated the CPW experiments with different microfluidics channel heights: in addition to 55 µm for which the Fig.…”