Microfluidic Self-Sorting of Mammalian Cells to Achieve Cell Cycle Synchrony by Hydrophoresis

摘要

Cell cycle studies for examining regulatory mechanisms and progression invariably require synchronization of cell cultures at a specific phase of the cell cycle. Current implementations to produce synchronous cell populations, however, tend to perturb normal cellular progression and metabolism and typically require complex, time-consuming preparations. Thus, it is challenging for the development of a simple, noninvasive, and effective means for cell cycle synchronization. We demonstrate the use of hydrophoretic size separation to sort cells in target phases of the cell cycle entirely based on a hydrodynamic principle. With this method, we found that there is a linear relationship between a cell's size and its position distribution in the hydrophoretic device. We also demonstrate the robustness of the hydrophoretic method for practical applications by sorting cells in the G_(0)/G_(1) and G_(2)/M phases out of the original, asynchronous cells with a high level of synchrony of 95.5percent and 85.2percent, respectively. These results show that the hydrophoretic size separation can be used in order to collect cells at the same phase of the cell cycle in a gentle, noninvasive way.