on-site measurement of cellular mechanical and electrical intrinsic parameters

What is it about?

Here, we propose an impedance-based electrical-mechanical flow cytometry framework for on-the-fly five-dimensional intrinsic measurement, i.e., radius r, cytoplasm conductivity σi, specific membrane capacitance Csm, Young’s modulus E, and fluidity β, of single cells.

Featured Image

Photo by Kai Dahms on Unsplash

Photo by Kai Dahms on Unsplash

Why is it important?

With multimodal high-dimensional characterization, the electrical-mechanical flow cytometry can better reveal the difference of cell types, demonstrated by the experimental results with three types of cancer cells (HepG2, MCF-7 and MDA-MB-468) with 93.4% classification accuracy and pharmacological perturbations of the cytoskeleton (fixed and Cytochalasin B treated cells) with 95.1% classification accuracy, which is markedly higher than those based on single-modal electrical or mechanical parameters.

Perspectives

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Without needing a camera for deformation monitoring, this cytometry stands as a first-of-its-kind high-throughput, high-efficiency cell characterization and phenotyping platform for multi-modal parameters.

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