Optofluidic device for high resolution and multiparametric measurement of single biological cells

Abstract

This paper reports a novel optofluidic device providing cellular sub-populations discrimination. We designed an optofluidic device based on an interferometric measurement able to discern cell types without fluorescent tags. The device yields a high sensitivity on the volume refractive index allowing for very small variations between cell populations to be detected. The optical sensing method for a single cell, at a fixed wavelength while the resonance peaks shifts, have proven to report various parameters linked to cellular intrinsic properties. Measurements collected with the device showed a significant difference between two analyzed cell types. To our knowledge, this is the only device that employs optical multiparametric and high-resolution measurements without fluorescent tags or dependency on shape or orientation on flowing cells.