Sorting healthy cells from diseased cells is critical to detecting diseases and treating them before damage is done to a patient. These... Show moreSorting healthy cells from diseased cells is critical to detecting diseases and treating them before damage is done to a patient. These diseases can be characterized based upon proteins, cytokines, DNA, pathology, blood tests, etc. However, another way of detecting them is using the mechanical properties of a cell, specifically the cell stiffness. In this study, a long microfluidic channel was designed, fabricated, and tested for flow using 6.7 µm polystyrene beads. Following this, Caco-2 cells and preadipocytes were flown through the channel and the travel time each cell took to flow through the channel was recorded, along with its cell diameter. The cells were then treated with blebbistatin, a myosin-II inhibitor, in order to soften the cell actin cytoskeleton and reduce the cell stiffness and were then flown through the channel again and the times taken to flow through were again recorded. We hypothesized that the stiffer a cell, the longer it would take to flow through the channel. From the results obtained using Caco-2 cells, we found that the blebbistatin treated cell times were much lower than the untreated cells, thus indicating that our hypothesis is true. Show less
