Size-dependent sorting of corneal limbal epithelial cell with microfluidic chip

Abstract

Limbus corneae is the border of the cornea and the sclera. That is a part of eye and composed of various kinds of cells. It is also said that that have a few stem cells of the corneal epithelium, those have multipotency and high ability to proliferate in limbus corneae. The identity of each cell may be distributed roughly by their size, so separation of these cells is essential for biomedical studies. We attempted to sort cells and particles at the size with microfluidic devices which are comparatively cheap and small scale. This method for hydrodynamic filtration and sorting was proposed using micro channels having multiple branch points, and the shape of micro channels of a microfluidic chip was designed. In this chip, cells move a channel along a wall surface and then cells smaller than each specific size are removed from mainstream to side channel in order. We used cell suspension and separated cells into 5 outlets. And, it was observed being each different in distribution of the size of separated cells.