Intellectual Merit: High throughput single cell analysis is the future trend for quantitative biology. Florescence activated cell sorter (FACS) is the most powerful and gold standard tool for high speed and multi-parametric single cell analyses. It has broad applications from fundamental research in immunology, cell biology, molecular biology, to clinical applications, such as AIDS and cancer detection and analysis. However, the current FACS is bulky, expensive and requires well-trained technician to operate in a centralized facility. High performance and low cost FACS for applications in clinics and resource-limited areas are highly sought but have not been realized. Many microfluidic FACS systems have been proposed over the past ten years, yet sorting live mammalian cells at high speeds with high sort purity and high cell viability remains a major challenge and the integrated system is not compact. Bulky optics such as PMT tubes for optical detection, and bulky external fluid pumping systems for fluid delivery are the two major barriers for FACS miniaturization. This proposal aims to develop a compact and high throughput FACS enabled by a novel ultrahigh sensitivity optoelectronic tweezers (OET) fabricated on a transparent sapphire substrate. This platform provides millions of light-actuated single cell trapping wells to provide a high throughput single cell sorting based on multicolor fluorescence signals. The massively parallel OET enabled optical manipulation gives O-FACS a throughput of 55,000 cells/sec on a smartphone size system, a throughput equivalent to current high-end benchtop FACS systems.
Broader Impacts: The proposed compact, handheld, and high throughput O-FACS platform will provide paradigm-shifting impacts in cell sorting fields. It will have broad applications from fundamental biological research to clinical applications. Results and expertise developed during the course of this project will also be incorporated into the PIs? teaching activities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Minority graduate and undergraduate students will participate in these projects through independent research courses. Students involved in this project will be exposed to an excellent multidisciplinary training environment in the UCLA Engineering School. The PIs will also be involved with the outstanding outreach program (CEED) in UCLA to recruit underrepresented college students for short-term project through the Introduction to Engineering Disciplines (E 87) course.
