Fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) is a modern cell analysis technique for quantitative detection of physiological, biochemical, immunological, and molecular biological traits of cells—it can further separate a specific subset of cell populations from complex biological samples. Though current commercial FACS has quite an accurate cell sorting capability, it still suffers some inherent limitations. First, current commercial FACS is bulky in size and extremely expensive, and can usually only be afforded by shared user facilities. Second, the current sorting mechanism requires generation of cell-contained aerosols through a small nozzle, which can induce large shear stress, causing damage to cells. Hence, there is a great need to develop a simple and biocompatible approach to sort biological cells not only with high purity, but also maintaining high cell viability and functionality.
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Source: Phys.org