Towards on-chip single cell manipulation of trap and rotation

Single cell manipulation technology has been widely applied in biological fields. Recently, a biochip platform with novel configuration of electrodes for cell 3-D rotation has been successfully developed. However, the rotation platform still has two major shortcomings of manual place of single cell and unstable rotation, which need to be addressed. To solve the two problems, in this paper we propose a new microfluidic chip with manipulation capabilities of single cell trap and single cell 3-D stable rotation both on one chip. The new chip integrates two parts: i) the top capture part is based on the least flow resistance principle and used to capture a single cell and transport it to the rotation chamber, ii) the bottom rotation part is based on dielectrophoresis (DEP) and used to 3-D rotate the single cell in the rotation chamber with enhanced stability. By COMSOL simulation, we have verified in principle the concept of on-chip single cell trap and 3-D stable rotation. The work has laid solid foundation for on-going chip fabrication and experiment validation.