Design and fabrication of a dielectrophoretic cell trap array

Abstract

We present a design and fabrication of an integrated micro-fabricated dielectrophoretic (DEP) cell trap array in a microfluidic channel. The cell trap array is capable of isolating target cells in high-throughput manner and producing cell clusters of tunable cell numbers. In this work, we have used commercially available polystyrene beads to show the concept. Bead clusters of various sizes were successfully produced using DEP force (attractive or repulsive). We have found that the number of beads in a cluster depends on the frequency of electric field and the concentration of beads in the mixture.