Development of a Single Cell Trapping Microfluidic Device

L. Weng [1], F. Ellett [1], J. F. Edd [1], M. Toner [1,2],
[1] Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
[2] Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston, MA, USA
Published in 2016

Array-based technologies are important for many applications in drug discovery, microbiology and cell biology. A large-scale array of single cells allows high-throughput monitoring of behaviors of individual cells in parallel, avoiding the lack of cell specificity inherent to bulk measurement methods. Here, we designed a passive-pumping microfluidic device for trapping cells in an array and used the COMSOL Multiphysics® software to simulate the velocity field of the laminar flow within the device. Our results show that 93.5% of the traps were occupied by cells and 71.0% of all the traps captured only a single cell. The single cell trapping microfluidic device developed here can be useful in experiments requiring monitoring of single cells, due to its high efficiency and the ease of operation.

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