Acoustic Cell Sorting
November 11, 2014 | Terry Sharrer
Cell sorting had long been an interest in livestock breeding and in 1981 researchers figured out how to differentiate bull semen into X and Y chromosome streams. But damage to cells was a frequent problem even with microfluidic devices of recent years. Now, building from an existing technique of using acoustic transducers to sort metastatic cancer cells from white blood cells, investigators from MIT, Penn State and Carnegie-Mellon have shown that placing the transducers at a slight angle on either side of a microfluidics channel can direct the enlarged tumor cells in one stream and the normal white blood cells in another with negligible damage. MORE
Image Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences