A microfluidic device to determine dielectric properties of a single cell : a combined dielectrophoresis and electrorotation technique

Electric fields interaction with living cells is commonly used in lab-on-chips. Indeed AC electrokinetic techniques (dielectrophoresis, electrorotation and traveling wave dielectrophoresis) are used to handle, trap or separate biological entities (eukaryotic cells, bacteria, yeasts, algae) in microfluidic devices. Several studies have shown how electric fields can be used to discriminate cell depending on their dielectric properties, which represents a growing interest for many biomedical applications (target cell identification from an heterogeneous biological sample, different stages of cancer disease diagnosis,...). This paper presents a microfluidic device devoted to the determination of a single cell electro-physiological properties combining dielectrophoresis force for the cell trapping, with electrorotation experiments to extract the dielectric properties of the cell. A microfluidic device has been designed for this purpose and evaluated with two different cell lines. Combining dielectrophoresis and electrorotation experiments allows reproducible measurement by avoiding possible perturbations or interactions with other cells duting the analysis within the biodevice. External sollicitations applied to biological cell might be monitored in ‘real-time’ in such microfluidic platform.