Microfluidic Platforms for High Throughput Quantitative Cell Mechanotyping
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Asmare, Norh Abebe
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Abstract
Since physiological and pathological events change the mechanical properties of cells, tools that rapidly capture and quantify such changes at the single-cell level can provide key insights into the utility of cell mechanics as a label-free biomarker. The objective of the presented work is to develop and characterize portable microfluidic devices that use arrays of microconstrictions to determine the mechanical properties of a sample population at high throughput. Presented in this thesis are two approaches to perform high throughput cell mechanotyping—measuring cell viscoelastic properties (elastic modulus and fluidity)—on a disposable microchip. The first approach efficiently monitors the deformation of cells en masse by using a network of barcoded electrical sensors that take snapshots of each cell before and after they undergo constriction and divide the unused bandwidth among parallel concurrent measurements to increase throughput. By logging cells exclusively outside the slowing microconstrictions, this technique mitigates the reduction in measurement throughput caused by the time a cell spends within a microconstriction. The second approach utilizes a high-speed camera to record the deformation of cells as they pass through a large array of micromachined constrictions to achieve an even higher throughput figure. By increasing access to currently underutilized mechanical biomarkers, the described works present significant potential to open new avenues of study and facilitate various applications within biomedicine.
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Date
2023-04-30
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Dissertation