DEP is an established technique for particle manipulation. Although first demonstrated in the 1950s, it was not until the development of miniaturization techniques in the 1990s that DEP became a popular research field. The 1990s saw an explosion of DEP publications using microfabricated metal electrode arrays to sort a wide variety of cells. The concurrent development of microfluidics enabled devices for flow management and better understanding of the interaction between hydrodynamic and electrokinetic forces. Starting in the 2000s, alternative techniques have arisen to overcome common problems in metal-electrode DEP, such as electrode fouling, and to increase the throughput of the system. Insulator-based DEP and light-induced DEP are the most significant examples. Most recently, new 3D techniques such as carbon-electrode DEP, contactless DEP, and the use of doped PDMS have further simplified the fabrication process. The constant desire of the community to develop practical solutions has led to devices which are more user friendly, less expensive, and are capable of higher throughput. The state-of-the-art of fabricating DEP devices is critically reviewed in this work. The focus is on how different fabrication techniques can boost the development of practical DEP devices to be used in different settings such as clinical cell sorting and infection diagnosis, industrial food safety, and enrichment of particle populations for drug development.

We introduce the integration of a novel dielectrophoresis (DEP)-assisted filter with a compact disk (CD)-based centrifugal platform. Carbon-electrode dielectrophoresis (carbon-DEP) refers to the use of carbon electrodes to induce DEP. In this work, 3D carbon electrodes are fabricated using the C-MEMS technique and are used to implement a DEP-enabled active filter to trap particles of interest. Compared to traditional planar metal electrodes, 3D carbon electrodes allow for superior filtering efficiency. The system includes mounting modular 3D carbon-DEP chips on an electrically interfaced rotating disk. This allows simple centrifugal pumping to replace the large footprint syringe pump approaches commonly used in DEP systems. The advantages of the CD setup include not only a reduced footprint, but also complexity and cost reduction by eliminating expensive precision pumps and fluidic interconnects. To demonstrate the viability of this system we quantified the filter efficiency in the DEP trapping of yeast cells from a mix of latex and yeast cells. Results demonstrate selective filtering at flow rates up to 35 microl min(-1). The impact of electrode height, DEP chip misalignment and particle sedimentation on filter efficiency and the advantages this system represents are analyzed. The ultimate goal is to obtain an automated platform for bioparticle sorting with application in different fields such as point-of-care diagnostics and cell-based therapies.

Carbon-electrode dielectrophoresis (carbon-DEP) is demonstrated here as an alternative to more traditional DEP techniques. Carbon-DEP combines advantages of metal-electrode and insulator-based DEP by using low-cost fabrication techniques and low voltages for particle manipulation. The use of 3-D electrodes is proved to yield significant advantages over the use of traditional planar electrodes. This paper details the fabrication of dense arrays of tall high aspect ratio carbon electrodes on a transparent fused-silica substrate. The shrinkage of the SU-8 structures during carbonization is characterized and a design tool for future devices is provided. Applications of carbon electrodes in DEP are then detailed and include particle positioning, high-throughput filtering and cell focusing using positive-DEP. Manipulated cells include Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster. The advantages and disadvantages of carbon-DEP are discussed at the end of this work.