Microfluidic Devices for Cellular Manipulation and Analysis on a Chip

This paper reports the micromachining technology developed for the fabrication of microfluidic devices for the biological research and also our recent development of on-chip manipulation and analysis of cells. Development of micromachining technologies such as deep glass etching using high-density plasmas has enabled us to fabricate highly functional microfluidic devices with precise microstructures and has appreciably increased the potential of the microchip technology for realizing innovative biological analysis tools and methods. As an instance, an innovative cell sorting system that can sort each biological cell based on the biologically significant information about their state has been developed using a microfluidic device and a microscopic image processing system. Damage-free selective collection of a single biological cell becomes possible owing to the combined use of the laminar sheath flow and the repulsive dielectrophoretic force in the well-designed microfabricated channels.