New Technology Developed For Single-Cell Analysis - Texas A&M Today - Texas A&M University Today

The quality to analyse the properties of idiosyncratic cells is captious to wide areas of beingness subject applications, from diagnosing diseases and processing amended therapeutics to characterizing pathogenic bacteria and processing cells for bioproduction applications.

However, the close investigation of idiosyncratic cells is simply a challenge, particularly erstwhile it comes to a cell’s biophysical properties, owed to ample spot variations among cells adjacent successful the aforesaid compartment colonisation arsenic good arsenic the beingness of uncommon compartment types wrong a larger population.

Addressing this need, Arum Han, Texas Instruments Professor II successful the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering astatine Texas A&M University, unneurotic with his postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers, has developed a caller exertion that tin accurately analyse compartment properties done the usage of a single-cell electrorotation microfluidic device, which utilizes an electrical tract to probe the cell’s properties.

The exertion works by utilizing an electrical tract to archetypal seizure a azygous compartment successful a microfluidic device, followed by applying a rotating electrical tract to rotate the trapped azygous compartment and past measuring the velocity of rotation. By knowing the input electrical tract parameters and analyzing the rotation speed, accurately analyzing the dielectric properties of a azygous compartment becomes possible.

“By knowing however overmuch unit was applied and however accelerated the compartment turns, you tin extract galore basal biophysical properties of cells,” Han said.

There person been erstwhile efforts to execute this, but this exertion is the astir close successful measuring these properties due to the fact that of its capableness to use a high-frequency electrical tract (up to 100 megahertz) and its usage of an eight-electrode-pair plan to simultaneously trap a azygous compartment and use rotational unit to the trapped cell.

The research team’s findings are featured connected the screen of the June 2022 contented of the journal Biomedical Microdevices.

This exertion has been afloat developed and applied to respective antithetic compartment investigation applications. Having successfully demonstrated that investigation tin beryllium accurately completed connected 1 compartment astatine a time, Yuwen Li, postgraduate pupil successful Han’s laboratory and the pb writer of the work, is present starring the effort to further make the exertion truthful that this tin beryllium executed astatine a overmuch higher velocity and against galore cells simultaneously.

Other contributors to this probe are postdoctoral researcher Can Huang and probe idiosyncratic Songi Han from the electrical and machine engineering department.

This task was funded done a cooperative statement with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, facilitated done the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.