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Development of microfluidic platform capable of characterizing cytoplasmic viscosity, cytoplasmic conductivity and specific membrane capacitance of single cells

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Abstract

This paper presents a microfluidic platform capable of characterizing cytoplasmic viscosity μcy, cytoplasmic conductivity σcy and specific membrane capacitance Csm of single cells continuously. A travelling cell is forced to squeeze through a major microfluidic constriction channel and aspirated into a side microfluidic constriction channel with cell aspiration length and impedance variations captured and translated into intrinsic markers of μcy, σcy and Csm based on an equivalent biophysical model. As a demonstration, μcy, σcy and Csm of hundreds of HL-60 cells that were native or treated by Cytochalasin D (CD for cytoskeleton modulation) or Concanavalin A (ConA for membrane regulation) were quantified where high success rates of cell type classification were found, which were 88.0% for HL-60 cells vs. HL-60 + CD cells and 75.6% for HL-60 cells vs. HL-60 + ConA cells. Furthermore, the microfluidic system was used to process granulocytes from two healthy donors where comparable distributions of μcy, σcy and Csm and low success rates of cell type classification (< 60%) were found, indicating that there may exist ranges of μcy (10–20 Pa•s), σcy (0.4–0.6 S/m) and Csm (2.0–3.0 μF/cm2) for normal granulocytes. In summary, the developed microfluidic system can collect cytoplasmic viscosity, cytoplasmic conductivity and specific membrane capacitance from hundreds of single cells simultaneously and may provide new perspective for future developments of hematology analyzers.

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Data availability

Cytoplasmic viscosity, cytoplasmic conductivity and specific membrane capacitance collected during this study are available as a supplementary file “Data of Single Cells”. The Excel-based file is composed of five sheets named after five experimental groups which are HL-60, HL-60 + CD, HL-60 + ConA, Healthy Donor 1 and Healthy Donor 2, respectively. In each sheet, there are four columns which are cell number (column A), cytoplasmic viscosity (column B), cytoplasmic conductivity (column C) and specific membrane capacitance (column D).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61431019, 61825107, 61671430, 61922079); Key Project (QYZDB-SSW-JSC011), Youth Innovation Promotion Association and Interdisciplinary Innovation Team of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Research Start-up Foundation for Talent Introduction of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (505019125); New Teacher Basic Scientific Research Foundation of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

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Author notes

  1. Yan Liu, Ke Wang and Xiaohao Sun co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yan Liu, Deyong Chen, Junbo Wang & Jian Chen

  2. School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yan Liu, Deyong Chen, Junbo Wang & Jian Chen

  3. School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Ke Wang

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, USA

    Xiaohao Sun

  5. School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Deyong Chen, Junbo Wang & Jian Chen

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  1. Yan Liu
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  2. Ke Wang
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  3. Xiaohao Sun
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  4. Deyong Chen
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Correspondence to Junbo Wang or Jian Chen.

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Liu, Y., Wang, K., Sun, X. et al. Development of microfluidic platform capable of characterizing cytoplasmic viscosity, cytoplasmic conductivity and specific membrane capacitance of single cells. Microfluid Nanofluid 24, 45 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-020-02350-6

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