Viscoelastic Microfluidics and Cell Sorting

Dear Colleague,

Cell sorting is indispensable in biomedical research and clinical applications, such as blood sorting for diagnosis and therapeutics. In the past decades, numerous microfluidic platforms including both active and passive approaches have been developed for improving the cell-sorting performance as well as for enabling unprecedented applications of cell sorting, including the isolation of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and exosomes for cancer disease management.

While these platforms are highly efficient and/or high throughput, most of them are designed to work with samples exhibiting properties of Newtonian fluid. However, most of the unmodified biological samples such as blood, saliva, and cytoplasma are non-Newtonian and viscoelastic in nature. The pretreatment to render a sample into Newtonian fluid is required in these platforms before cell sorting. However, such pretreatment is not preferred for processing real-world samples, as it can be time-consuming and lead to added risks which could compromise the end results. Therefore, microfluidic methods which leverage the inherent nature of the biosamples and thus eliminate sample pretreatment are the ongoing direction of the field of cell sorting.

The emerging viscoelastic microfluidics, shear-induced diffusion (SID) devices as well as the active method based on lateral cavity acoustic transducers (LCAT) are the few examples of the ongoing research toward the elimination of sample pretreatments for cell sorting. Meanwhile, synthetic microparticles are continuously used for prototyping microfluidic devices, and numerical simulation is increasingly employed for improving the fundamental understanding of the physics behind microfluidic focusing and sorting phenomena.

As such, this Special Issue seeks to showcase research papers, communications, and review articles that focus on novel microfluidic approaches that utilize the properties of biological samples for high-performance cell sorting, and that investigate the fundamental physics of the cell focusing phenomena in microflows, with special emphasis on the utilization of fluid viscoelasticity for cell focusing and sorting. This Special Issue welcomes manuscripts with topics including, but not limited to, the following:

1. Viscoelastic and elasto-inertial flows;
2. Particle migration, focusing, and/or separation;
3. Numerical simulation in particle migration;
4. Blood sorting (e.g., plasma, leukocytes, CTCs);
5. Hybrid methods for cell sorting;
6. Bacteria, exosome, or nanoparticle separation. 

Prof. Dr. Abraham Lee
Prof. Dr. Ian Papautsky
Dr. Jian Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Micromachines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• microfluidics
• viscoelastic focusing
• blood sorting
• bacteria separation
• exosomes
• circulating tumor cells
• saliva
• leukocyte separation
• cell sorting
• elasto-inertial migration
• microparticles
• nanoparticles
• acoustics
• numerical simulation