Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2018 Mar 12;4:17091. doi: 10.1038/micronano.2017.91

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2018

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

PMC Copyright notice

Principle of mechanical phenotyping via mechano-NPS. (a) A photographic image of the microfluidic platform. The scale bar corresponds to 4 mm. Red-dashed box shows a close-up view of the entire microfluidic channel. The microfluidic channel (pore) is segmented by nodes and a contraction channel. Two electrodes at both ends of the channel apply a constant voltage (1 V), and two inner electrodes measure the change of current across the channel. The regions where free-cell diameter, deformed diameter, and cell recovery are measured are as indicated. (b) Expected current pulse generated by a cell transiting the microfluidic channel. I, ΔI_np, ΔI_c, and ΔI_r correspond to the baseline current and the current drop by a cell transiting a node-pore, a contraction channel, and a node-pore after the contraction channel, respectively. Numbers in parentheses (1–4) correspond to the same specific segments of the microchannel (pore, node, and contraction channel) in (a). ΔT_cont corresponds to the time duration of a cell passing through the contraction channel, and ΔT_r indicates the time needed for ΔI_r to equal ΔI_np (see Supplementary Figure S6 for detailed information). (inset) An actual current pulse caused by a human mammary epithelial cell traversing the channel. (c) Time-snapshots of an MCF-7 cell (bordered by a white circle) in each of the different segments of the microfluidic channel (white dashed line; see Supplementary Videos 1 and 2 for detailed information). Numbers in parentheses (1–4) correspond to the same specific segments of the microchannel (pore, node, and contraction channel) in (a). (d) Cross-sectional diagram of the channel segments occupied by a cell. ‘AA’ and ‘BB’ indicate the corresponding cross-sections in (c). w_pore, w_node, w_c, and h_channel correspond to the widths of the pore, node, and the contraction channel, and the height of the channel, respectively. D_cell and L_deform correspond to the free-cell diameter in the node-pore channel and the elongated length of the deformed cell in the contraction channel, respectively.