Parallel cell biochips: cell placement using dielectrophoresis or microfluidic effects

Parallel cell biochips: cell placement using dielectrophoresis or microfluidic effects. After a brief overview of the state of the art in the domain of cell biochips, and more particularly, the usual methods for cell placement and characterization on a chip, our research on highly parallelized cell placement on a chip is presented. Single cell arraying methods, using dielectrophoresis effects, or microfluidic effects produced by bulk micromachined sub-micrometric capillaries are compared. Target applications of such cell biochips cover the domain of gene transfer on a large population of cells, parallelized cell sorting, or drug high-throughput screening on living cells.