Milliliter Scale Acoustophoresis Based Bioparticle Processing Platform

Abstract

Bioparticles such as mammalian cells and bacteria can be manipulated directly or indirectly for multiple applications such as sample preparation for diagnostic applications mainly up-concentration, enrichment & separation as well as immunoassay development. There are various active and passive microfluidic particle manipulation techniques where Acoustophoresis is a powerful technique showing high cell viability. The use of disposable glass capillaries for acoustophoresis, instead of cleanroom fabricated glass-silicon chip can potentially bring down the cost factor substantially, aiding the realization of this technique for real-world diagnostic devices. Unlike available chips and capillary-based microfluidic devices, we report milliliter-scale platform able to accommodate 1ml of a sample for acoustophoresis based processing on a market available glass capillary. Although it is presented as a generic platform but as a demonstration we have shown that polystyrene suspending medium sample can be processed with trapping efficiency of 87% and the up-concentration factor of 10 times in a flow through manner i.e., at 35μl/min. For stationary volume accommodation, this platform practically offers 50 times more sample handling capacity than most of the microfluidic setups. Furthermore, we have also shown that with diluted blood (0.6%) in a flow-through manner, 82% of the white blood cells (WBCs) per ml could be kept trapped. This milliliter platform could potentially be utilized for assisting in sample preparation, plasma separation as well as a flow-through immunoassay assay development for clinical diagnostic applications.