Carbon Cone Electrodes for Selection, Manipulation and Lysis of Single Cells

Here we present initial experiments towards an integrated platform for single cell selection, manipulation and lysis. The premise is that an array of polarized conical carbon electrodes can be dipped in a cell culture, trap cells of interest using dielectrophoresis and transport them to specific locations where they can be lyzed electrically. We aim at developing an automated tool to extract intracellular components from targeted particles over specific locations, i.e., a DNA microarray or other functionalized spots. What we contribute in this work is modeling of the electric field and its gradient around carbon cones, as well as initial cone fabrication results. To the best of our knowledge, both the fabrication of conical glassy carbon electrodes and the general concept of the proposed platform are novel. Ongoing work is on demonstrating cell trapping and lysis using these conical electrodes by only varying the magnitude and frequency of their polarizing AC signal.