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Credit: Duke University
Using components similar to those that control electrons in microchips, engineers have designed a device that can sort, store, and retrieve individual cells for study.
The team hopes this chip-like device could be scaled up to sort and store hundreds of thousands of individual living cells in a matter of minutes.
Benjamin Yellen, PhD, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues described the device in Nature Communications.
The team created the device by printing thin electromagnetic components, like those found on microchips, onto a slide. These patterns create magnetic tracks and elements like switches, transistors, and diodes that guide magnetic beads and single cells tagged with magnetic nanoparticles through a thin, liquid film.
Like a series of small conveyer belts, localized rotating magnetic fields move the beads and cells along specific directions etched into a track, while built-in switches direct traffic to storage sites on the chip. The result is an integrated circuit that controls small magnetic objects much the way electrons are controlled on computer chips.
The engineers showed that a grid of 9 compartments—3 across by 3 down—allows the magnetic beads to enter but not leave. By tagging cells with magnetic particles and directing them to different compartments, the cells can be separated, sorted, stored, studied, and retrieved.
“You need to analyze thousands of cells to get the statistics necessary to understand which genes are being turned on and off in response to pharmaceuticals or other stimuli,” Dr Yellen said. “And if you’re looking for cells exhibiting rare behavior, which might be one cell out of a thousand, then you need arrays that can control hundreds of thousands of cells.”
As an example, Dr Yellen pointed to cells affected by cancers. Most afflicted cells are active and can be targeted by therapeutics. But a few rare cells remain dormant, biding their time and avoiding destruction before activating and bringing the disease out of remission.
With the new technology, Dr Yellen and his colleagues hope to watch millions of individual cells, pick out the few that become dormant, quickly retrieve them, and analyze their genetic activity.
“Our technology can offer new tools to improve our basic understanding of cancer metastasis at the single-cell level, how cancer cells respond to chemical and physical stimuli, and to test new concepts for gene delivery and metabolite transfer during cell division and growth,” said study author CheolGi Kim, PhD, of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea.
The researchers now plan to demonstrate a larger grid of 8-by-8 or 16-by-16 compartments with cells, and then to scale it up to hundreds of thousands of compartments.
“Our idea is a simple one,” Dr Kim said. “Because it is a system similar to electronics and is based on the same technology, it would be easy to fabricate. That makes the system relevant to commercialization.”
“There’s another technique paper we need to do as a follow-up before we get to actual biological applications,” Dr Yellen added. “But they’re on their way.” 
Credit: Duke University
Using components similar to those that control electrons in microchips, engineers have designed a device that can sort, store, and retrieve individual cells for study.
The team hopes this chip-like device could be scaled up to sort and store hundreds of thousands of individual living cells in a matter of minutes.
Benjamin Yellen, PhD, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues described the device in Nature Communications.
The team created the device by printing thin electromagnetic components, like those found on microchips, onto a slide. These patterns create magnetic tracks and elements like switches, transistors, and diodes that guide magnetic beads and single cells tagged with magnetic nanoparticles through a thin, liquid film.
Like a series of small conveyer belts, localized rotating magnetic fields move the beads and cells along specific directions etched into a track, while built-in switches direct traffic to storage sites on the chip. The result is an integrated circuit that controls small magnetic objects much the way electrons are controlled on computer chips.
The engineers showed that a grid of 9 compartments—3 across by 3 down—allows the magnetic beads to enter but not leave. By tagging cells with magnetic particles and directing them to different compartments, the cells can be separated, sorted, stored, studied, and retrieved.
“You need to analyze thousands of cells to get the statistics necessary to understand which genes are being turned on and off in response to pharmaceuticals or other stimuli,” Dr Yellen said. “And if you’re looking for cells exhibiting rare behavior, which might be one cell out of a thousand, then you need arrays that can control hundreds of thousands of cells.”
As an example, Dr Yellen pointed to cells affected by cancers. Most afflicted cells are active and can be targeted by therapeutics. But a few rare cells remain dormant, biding their time and avoiding destruction before activating and bringing the disease out of remission.
With the new technology, Dr Yellen and his colleagues hope to watch millions of individual cells, pick out the few that become dormant, quickly retrieve them, and analyze their genetic activity.
“Our technology can offer new tools to improve our basic understanding of cancer metastasis at the single-cell level, how cancer cells respond to chemical and physical stimuli, and to test new concepts for gene delivery and metabolite transfer during cell division and growth,” said study author CheolGi Kim, PhD, of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea.
The researchers now plan to demonstrate a larger grid of 8-by-8 or 16-by-16 compartments with cells, and then to scale it up to hundreds of thousands of compartments.
“Our idea is a simple one,” Dr Kim said. “Because it is a system similar to electronics and is based on the same technology, it would be easy to fabricate. That makes the system relevant to commercialization.”
“There’s another technique paper we need to do as a follow-up before we get to actual biological applications,” Dr Yellen added. “But they’re on their way.”
Credit: Duke University
Using components similar to those that control electrons in microchips, engineers have designed a device that can sort, store, and retrieve individual cells for study.
The team hopes this chip-like device could be scaled up to sort and store hundreds of thousands of individual living cells in a matter of minutes.
Benjamin Yellen, PhD, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues described the device in Nature Communications.
The team created the device by printing thin electromagnetic components, like those found on microchips, onto a slide. These patterns create magnetic tracks and elements like switches, transistors, and diodes that guide magnetic beads and single cells tagged with magnetic nanoparticles through a thin, liquid film.
Like a series of small conveyer belts, localized rotating magnetic fields move the beads and cells along specific directions etched into a track, while built-in switches direct traffic to storage sites on the chip. The result is an integrated circuit that controls small magnetic objects much the way electrons are controlled on computer chips.
The engineers showed that a grid of 9 compartments—3 across by 3 down—allows the magnetic beads to enter but not leave. By tagging cells with magnetic particles and directing them to different compartments, the cells can be separated, sorted, stored, studied, and retrieved.
“You need to analyze thousands of cells to get the statistics necessary to understand which genes are being turned on and off in response to pharmaceuticals or other stimuli,” Dr Yellen said. “And if you’re looking for cells exhibiting rare behavior, which might be one cell out of a thousand, then you need arrays that can control hundreds of thousands of cells.”
As an example, Dr Yellen pointed to cells affected by cancers. Most afflicted cells are active and can be targeted by therapeutics. But a few rare cells remain dormant, biding their time and avoiding destruction before activating and bringing the disease out of remission.
With the new technology, Dr Yellen and his colleagues hope to watch millions of individual cells, pick out the few that become dormant, quickly retrieve them, and analyze their genetic activity.
“Our technology can offer new tools to improve our basic understanding of cancer metastasis at the single-cell level, how cancer cells respond to chemical and physical stimuli, and to test new concepts for gene delivery and metabolite transfer during cell division and growth,” said study author CheolGi Kim, PhD, of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea.
The researchers now plan to demonstrate a larger grid of 8-by-8 or 16-by-16 compartments with cells, and then to scale it up to hundreds of thousands of compartments.
“Our idea is a simple one,” Dr Kim said. “Because it is a system similar to electronics and is based on the same technology, it would be easy to fabricate. That makes the system relevant to commercialization.”
“There’s another technique paper we need to do as a follow-up before we get to actual biological applications,” Dr Yellen added. “But they’re on their way.”