Microflow cytometer chip with multiple electro-rotation units for measuring electrical properties of single yeast cells

Abstract

At present, many single-cell electrical parameter measurement techniques have exhibit broad application prospects, but there are still some limitations such as complex single-cell operation and time-consuming measurement. This paper proposed a microflow cytometer chip with multiple electro-rotation units for measuring the electrical properties of single cells. The microdevice leverages three serial electro-rotation units to rapidly obtain rotation speeds under different signal frequencies. According to the rotation results, the electrical parameters (membrane permittivity and cytoplasmic conductivity) are estimated by using Maxwell's mixture equation fitting and neural network fitting methods respectively. We demonstrated the measurement advantages of combining microflow and electro-rotation techniques. Experimental results show that the cytometer measurement method greatly improves the throughput of single-cell characterization with a guaranteed error of less than 0.8%. The microdevice provides a microfluidic platform capable of characterizing the electrical properties of cells and the possibility of combining with neural networks.

Keywords

• Microfluidics
• Dielectrophoresis
• Electro-rotation
• Electrical properties
• Neural network