High-throughput, sheathless, magnetophoretic separation of magnetic and non-magnetic particles with a groove-based channel

The separation of target objects conjugated with magnetic particles is a significant application in biomedicine and clinical diagnosis. Conventionalmagnetophoresis-baseddevices use a sheathflow to pre-focus the particles into a single stream and typically operate at a lowflow rate. We demonstrate in this work a high-throughput, sheathless,magnetophoretic separation of magnetic and non-magnetic beads in a groove-based channel, and also report on an interesting phenomenon where the same magnetic beads in the same microchannel, but with different setups, has a different particle tracing; a binary mixture of magnetic and non-magnetic beads in a dilutedferrofluid, is then fed into the channel. These magnetic beads are focused near the centreline of the channel by exploiting positivemagnetophoresis and microvortices generated by grooves, whereas the non-magnetic beads are focused along the sidewalls of the channel by negativemagnetophoresis and hydrophoresis. These magnetic and non-magnetic beads are separated in a wide range offlow rates (up to 80  μl  min−1).

Source: Applied Physics Letters - November 23, 2016 Category: Physics Authors: S. Yan, J. Zhang, D. Yuan, Q. Zhao, J. Ma and W. H. Li Source Type: research