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Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is the name given to the induced movement of polarisable particles in non-uniform electric fields. First described analytically in 1951, it has been used since 1966 for the analysis of cells and other bioparticles. It relies on (typically) micromanufactured, planar electrodes in microfluidic systems, and has been applied to study and separate a wide range of cells and other bioparticles. As a discipline it has become widely adopted around the world, with typically 400 publications on the subject in an average year; however, it has never attained widespread adoption in the target biological community, but to the complexities of implementation and interpretation of results. We aim to remedy that through development both of instrumentation and applications.
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Numbers in bold refer to the papers on the Publications page.
For more information on DEP, please visit the Dielectrophoresis Network page.
One of the drawbacks of DEP has been the reliance on expensive-to-manufacture planar microelectrodes to generate nonuniform fields. These electrodes end to require microfluidic channels that are expensive, easy to block and hard to clean, that provide very low throughput – far beyond that expected by biologists in the 21st century, familiar with systems like flow cytometry and FACS.
We have developed an alternative approach that required no microfabrication – instead using laminate construction and micromachining to achieve the same effect (29,36). These DEP-wells were first used for cell separation, but were quickly adapted for cell analysis (37,51,57,78). This was quickly adapted into a high-throughput analysis system called 3DEP (88), which was commercialised in 2015 , and has been bought by over 30 labs across five continents; and is characterised by his high speed, how cost, high throughput and ability to take measurements in high conductivity media. Studies have shown the 3DEP to be effective at analysing across a wide range of scales, from large cells such as cardiomyocytes, to small cells such as bacteria (46) and platelets (88), to nanoparticles such as silicon nanowires (80).
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In the meantime, development of the original separation system showed that it was capable of very low-loss separation (67), which led to the development of a massively parallel separation system called EPACE (electrophysiology-activated cell enrichment), potentially one of the fastest cell separator in the world, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA (82). This is now also being commercialised under the name Deparator.
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A smaller-scale version, the DEP-Dot, has also been developed (49) and patented (38), though this has been more widely used for DEP-mediated 3D culture in hydrogels (64) by the Labeed group.
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1. The DEP-Well system
2. DEP for diagnostics and cell biology
3. Developing DEP at the nanoscale
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"Begin with the possible and gradually move towards the impossible"
- Robert Fripp, guitarist