Laser guidance in a microfluidic biochip

In this study, we developed a microfluidic biochip to perform laser guidance on two cell types, chick embryonic forebrain neurons and chick embryonic spinal cord neurons. The neurons we obtained from these two cell types have no difference in morphology as observed under a high-magnification microscope. However, when flowing in the microfluidic channel and simultaneously being laser-guided, the two cell types gained quite different guidance velocities under the same experimental conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that different cell types with the same morphology (e.g., size, shape, etc.) can be effectively distinguished from each other by measuring the difference of guidance velocities (the maximum flow velocities minus the initial flow velocities). This technique is expected to provide a new approach to high-throughput, label-free cell sorting with sensitivity.