The purification and sorting of cells using microfluidic methodologies has been a remarkably active area of research over the past decade. Much of the scientific and technological work associated with microfluidic cell separation has been driven by needs in clinical diagnostics and therapeutic monitoring, most notably in the context of circulating tumor cells. The last several years have seen a...

Obtaining pure cell subpopulations is often the first step for a wide range of applications. Here, we present a generic cell isolation strategy, the “buoyancy activated cell sorting (BACS)”, using glass microbubbles attached with targetspecific antibodies. The design of BACS was centered on the opposite movements of cells and microbubbles during mixing, ultimately improving the capture yield by...

Cell sorting or gating homogenous subpopulations from single-cell data enables cell-type specific characterization, such as cell-type genomic profiling as well as the study of tumor progression. This highlight summarizes recently developed automated gating algorithms that are optimized for both population identification and sorting homogeneous single cells in heterogeneous single-cell data. Dat...

Independent Component Analysis is one of the most widely used methods for blind source separation. In this paper we use this technique to estimate the most important compounds which play a role in the ripening of tomatoes. Spectral images of tomatoes were analyzed. Two main independent components were found. These components resemble the actual absorption spectra of lycopene and chlorophyll. Co...

Household waste separation at the source is a central part of waste management systems in Sweden. Resource recovery of materials and energy increased substantially after separate collection was implemented in the 1990s. A procedure to transform recycling behavior for the sorting of household waste—called the recycling behavior transition (RBT) procedure—was designed and implemented in a waste m...

Acoustophoresis, the ability to acoustically manipulate particles and cells inside a microfluidic channel, is a critical enabling technology for cell-sorting applications. However, one of the major impediments for routine use of acoustophoresis at clinical laboratory has been the reliance on the inherent physical properties of cells for separation. Here, we present a microfluidic-based microBub...

1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Principle and strategies for microfluidic cell sorting 3.1. Active multi-channel switch 3.2. Field flow fractionation 3.3. Local nonuniform field flow fractionation 3.4. Differential immobilization 3.5. Direct manipulation 4. Sorting mechanisms 4.1. Electric mechanism 4.2. Optical mechanism 4.3. Magnetic mechanism 4.4. Hydrodynamic mechanism 4.5. Acoustic mechanis...

We present a nanoparticle size-separation device based on nanofluidic rocking Brownian motor. It features ratchet-shaped electrostatic particle potential with increasing barrier heights along the transport direction. The sharp drop of current height is exploited to separate suspension into multiple subpopulations. By solving Fokker-Planck equation, we show that physics separation mechanism gove...