J024052 Behaviors of Cells in a Uniform AC Electric Field

Abstract

The AC electric field driven manipulation of suspensions becomes one of the major techniques in micro- and nano-devices in the field of biotechnology. In the present study, experimental and numerical studies of cells suspensions in a uniform high frequency AC electric field have been performed to explore the mechanism of the evolution of aggregation and clustering of cells under the exposure of the uniform high frequency AC electric field. In the uniform AC electric field, only forces of dipole-dipole attractive/repulsive interactions present between cells. This behavior of dielectric particles in the uniform AC field, which is differ from that in the non-uniform field, is markedly advantageous in applying DEP technology to positioning of particles in a suspension. Suspensions of HeLa cells in 10% sucrose solutions were used for the experiment while the method of molecular dynamics (MD) was employed to analyze the problem numerically. A theoretical model to compute the trajectories of individual cells under the action of dielectrophoretic (DEP), dipolar interparticle, viscous, and gravitational forces was newly developed. Results demonstrated that the cells began to aggregate locally depending on field frequency. In the present experiment, the lowest field frequency, 10 Hz, used in the experiment was found to effectively aggregate cells.