Acoustofluidic coating of particles and cells

Abstract

On-chip microparticle and cell coating technologies enable a myriad of applications in chemistry, engineering, and medicine. Current microfluidic coating technologies often rely on magnetic labeling and concurrent deflection of particles across laminar streams of chemicals. Herein, we introduce an acoustofluidic approach for microparticle and cell coating by implementing tilted-angle standing surface acoustic waves (taSSAWs) into microchannels with multiple inlets. The primary acoustic radiation force generated by the taSSAW field was exploited in order to migrate the particles across the microchannel through multiple laminar streams which contained the buffer and coating chemicals. We demonstrate effective coating of polystyrene microparticles and HeLa cells without the need for magnetic labelling. We characterized the coated particles and HeLa cells with fluorescence microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Our acoustofluidicbased particle and cell coating method is label-free, biocompatible, and simple. It can be useful in the on-chip manufacturing of many functional particles and cells.

One‐Step Assembly of a Biomimetic Biopolymer Coating for Particle Surface Engineering

“…Thus, particle surface engineering has become a very important field in material design and application . Diverse surface functionalization routes have been investigated, ranging from Stober coatings and layer‐by‐layer absorption to polymerization strategies . However, few methods can functionalize particles with different compositions, sizes, shapes, and structures in a simple mild one‐step aqueous process with low‐cost.…”

Emerging on-chip surface acoustic wave technology for small biomaterials manipulation and characterization

“…50 By proper alignment between the microfluidics and SAW propagation, researchers have demonstrated cell washing with high purity 51 or cell coating with chemicals with high efficiency. 52…”

A practical microfluidic pump enabled by acoustofluidics and 3D printing

“…While acoustic radiation forces mainly arise from a gradient due to scattering, reflection, dampening, interference or absorption of acoustic waves (Bruus 2012 ; Karlsen et al 2016 ), acoustic streaming results from viscous attenuation of acoustic waves inside a fluid medium (Friend and Yeo 2011 ). Acoustic radiation forces have been conveniently used to manipulate single cells and organisms in various modes (Devendran et al 2014 ; Guo et al 2015 ; Ayan et al 2016 ; Sesen et al 2017 ), whereas acoustic streaming has been primarily applied in fluid manipulation in microfluidics (Phan et al 2016 ). Different mechanisms have been explored to generate acoustic streaming and fluid pumping including surface acoustic wave-based localized streaming (Wu et al 2019b ), trapped microbubble-based microstreaming (Tovar et al 2011 ; Gao et al 2020 ), and sharp edge-based acoustic streaming (Huang et al 2014 ; Nama et al 2014 ; Doinikov et al 2020 ).…”