High efficiency single cell capture chip utilizing herringbone vortices for small sample analysis

We present a high-efficiency single-cell capture scheme utilizing herringbone vortices for small assay samples consisting of only tens of cells. In our previous work of hydrodynamic cell capture, the laminar flow with abrupt expansion in a mircowell restricts the capture efficiency by diverting cells away from the capture site, which results in low capture rate. In this work, we used herringbone vortices to steer cells towards the capture site to facilitate cell capture efficiency. The proposed design achieves ∼65% capture efficiency when loading only 20, 40 and 60 MDA-MB-321 (breast cancer) cells. Compared to the capture efficiency of ∼35% without the herringbone, the proposed cell-focusing capture scheme demonstrates the feasibility for small samples analysis.