Microfabricated particle focusing device
| DWPI Title: Microfabricated particle focusing device used in e.g. flow cytometry, energizes microelectrode array with alternating current voltage to focus stream to columns of flowing particles near electric field gradient minima |
| Abstract: A microfabricated particle focusing device comprises an acoustic portion to preconcentrate particles over large spatial dimensions into particle streams and a dielectrophoretic portion for finer particle focusing into single-file columns. The device can be used for high throughput assays for which it is necessary to isolate and investigate small bundles of particles and single particles. |
| Use: Microfabricated particle focusing device used in microfluidic assays such as flow cytometry and biochemical procedures. |
| Advantage: The structure of the microfabricated particle focusing device is simple. The combination of acoustic focusing for large-scale particle preconcentration and dielectrophoretic forces for single-particle focusing and sorting of the preconcentrated particles is enabled. The cost of the microfabricated particle focusing device is reduced and portable platform for performing sophisticated bead-based or cellular assays is provided. The precise alignment of beads in the acoustic focusing portion to evenly populate microparticles within the dielectrophoretic focusing portion is achieved so that the throughput of cell analysis is increased. Since the upstream acoustic focusing portion is adapted to minimize the variability in the particle positions by coarsely focusing particles before fine adjustment is made by the dielectrophoretic portion, the higher fidelity optical signal measurements for applications such as flow cytometry is enabled and the sticking of beads to channel walls and particle-particle clumping are prevented. |
| Novelty: Thedevice (10) has a substrate (13) and channel (11) that includes upstream acoustic portion (20) with transducer (22) and downstream dielectrophoretic portion (30) with microelectrode array (32). The particles (15) in fluid (14) are pre-concentrated into streams of particles along pressure nodes or anti-nodes in upstream portion when transducer is energized with radiofrequency voltage. The streams are focused into columns (16) of flowing particles near electric field gradient minima in downstream portion when the array is energized with alternating current voltage. |
| Filed: 6/9/2009 |
| Application Number: US2009481064A |
| Tech ID: SD 10818.1 |
| This invention was made with Government support under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 awarded by the United States Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. The Government has certain rights in the invention. |
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