Tropes

futurity_medicine 00465.txt

#Chip uses magnetism to sort living cells Researchers have developed a chip-like device that similar to a random access memory chip, but it moves cells instead of electrons. Scaling up the device could mean sorting and storing hundreds of thousands of individual living cells in a matter of minutes. The researchers hope the cell-sorting system will revolutionize research by allowing the fast, efficient control and separation of individual cells that could then be studied in vast numbers. ost experiments grind up a bunch of cells and analyze genetic activity by averaging the population of an entire tissue rather than looking at the differences between single cells within that population, says Benjamin Yellen, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke university Pratt School of engineering. hat like taking the eye color of everyone in a room and finding that the average color is grey, when not a single person in the room has grey eyes. You need to be able to study individual cells to understand and appreciate small but significant differences in a similar population. Moving cells with magnets Yellen and his collaborator, Cheol Gi Kim of Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South korea, printed thin electromagnetic components like those found on microchips onto a slide. These patterns create magnetic tracks and elements like switches transistors, and diodes that guide magnetic beads and single cells tagged with magnetic nanoparticles through a thin liquid film. Like a series of small conveyer belts, localized rotating magnetic fields move the beads and cells along specific directions etched into a track, while built-in switches direct traffic to storage sites on the chip. The result is an integrated circuit that controls small magnetic objects much like the way electrons are controlled on computer chips. In the study, the engineers demonstrate a 3-by-3 grid of compartments that allow magnetic beads to enter but not leave. By tagging cells with magnetic particles and directing them to different compartments, the cells can be separated, sorted, stored, studied, and retrieved. Applications for HIV and cancer In a random access memory chip, similar logic circuits manipulate electrons on a nanometer scale, controlling billions of compartments in a square inch. But cells are much larger than electrons, which would limit the new devices to hundreds of thousands of storage spaces per square inch. But Yellen and Kim say that still plenty small for their purposes. ou need to analyze thousands of cells to get the statistics necessary to understand which genes are being turned on and off in response to pharmaceuticals or other stimuli says Yellen. nd if youe looking for cells exhibiting rare behavior, which might be one cell out of a thousand, then you need arrays that can control hundreds of thousands of cells. As an example, Yellen points to cells afflicted by HIV or cancer. In both diseases, most afflicted cells are active and can be targeted by therapeutics. A few rare cells, however, remain dormant, biding their time and avoiding destruction before activating and bringing the disease out of remission. With the new technology, the researchers hope to watch millions of individual cells, pick out the few that become dormant, quickly retrieve them and analyze their genetic activity. aybe then we could find a way to target the dormant cells, says Yellen. Kim adds, ur technology can offer new tools to improve our basic understanding of cancer metastasis at the single cell level, how cancer cells respond to chemical and physical stimuli, and to test new concepts for gene delivery and metabolite transfer during cell division and growth. Scaling up The researchers now plan to demonstrate a larger grid of 8-by-8 or 16-by-16 compartments with cells, and then to scale it up to hundreds of thousands of compartments. If successful their technology would lend itself well to manufacturing, giving scientists around the world access to single-cell experimentation. ur idea is a simple one, says Kim. ecause it is a system similar to electronics and is based on the same technology, it would be easy to fabricate. That makes the system relevant to commercialization. here another technique paper we need to do as a follow-up before we get to actual biological applications, adds Yellen. ut theye on their way. This research had support from the National Science Foundation, the Research Triangle Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning. The study will appear online today in Nature Communications. Source: Duke Universit a

< Back - Next >