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An IB-LBM study of continuous cell sorting in deterministic lateral displacement arrays

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Abstract

The deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) is an important method used to sort particles and cells of different sizes. In this paper, the flexible cell sorting with the DLD method is studied by using a numerical model based on the immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM). In this model, the fluid motion is solved by the LBM, and the cell membrane–fluid interaction is modeled with the LBM. The proposed model is validated by simulating the rigid particle sorted with the DLD method, and the results are found in good agreement with those measured in experiments. We first study the effect of flexibility on a single cell and multiple cells continuously going through a DLD device. It is found that the cell flexibility can significantly affect the cell path, which means the flexibility could have significant effects on the continuous cell sorting by the DLD method. The sorting characteristics of white blood cells and red blood cells are further studied by varying the spatial distribution of cylinder arrays and the initial cell–cell distance. The numerical results indicate that a well concentrated cell sorting can be obtained under a proper arrangement of cylinder arrays and a large enough initial cell–cell distance.

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 81301291), the Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project (Grant YETP1208), and UNSW Special Research Grants Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Qiang Wei, Yuan-Qing Xu & Xiao-Ying Tang

  2. Key Laboratory of Convergence Medical Engineering System and Healthcare Technology, The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Qiang Wei, Yuan-Qing Xu & Xiao-Ying Tang

  3. School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales, Canberra, ACT, 2600, Australia

    Fang-Bao Tian

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  1. Qiang Wei
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Correspondence to Yuan-Qing Xu.

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Wei, Q., Xu, YQ., Tang, XY. et al. An IB-LBM study of continuous cell sorting in deterministic lateral displacement arrays. Acta Mech. Sin. 32, 1023–1030 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-016-0566-2

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