Gallery-MC Kim

Cell trapping device 1	"C-shaped sieve" shows pronounced aggregation of the cells in the downstream section of the trap. Large cell aggregates are particularly unfavorable for microscale cell culture, as they can quickly exhaust the local nutrients and reduce oxygenation efficiency, stressing the culture to the point of cell death by necrosis or apoptosis.
Cell trapping device 2	"flat-type sieve" consists of an array of nine sieves arranged in a symmetric diamond-shaped pattern. Under simulated conditions, sieves closer to the chamber entrances captured cells well for both geometries, while the downstream sieves remained empty.
Cell trapping device 3	Using 3T3 cells as a model system, the motion of each individual cell was calculated using a one-way coupled Lagrangian method. The cell was assumed to be a solid sphere, and interactions with other cells were only considered when a cell sediment in the trap. The ordinary differential equations were solved along the cell trajectory for the three components of the velocity and location vector by using the Rosenbrock method based on an adaptive time-stepping technique.
Cell loading simulation To investigate the dynamics of the cell trapping process, the simulated loading of the individual trapping arrays and sieve conformations was analyzed at discrete time steps. Analysis of the figure reveals that the filling of the traps at the prescribed flow rate (1 microL/min) and cell concentration (5x10⁶ cells/mL) occurs quite rapidly. By 30 s, most of the traps are fully occupied, with few cells added between 30 and 90 s.	Cell loading experiment Experimental loading of PDMS microfluidic array devices with 3T3 cells. Validation of the predictive value of modeling, using 3T3 cells flowed through microfluidic devices containing U-type sieves under the simulation flow parameters, showed excellent agreement between experiment and simulation with respect to cell number per trap and the uniformity of cell distribution within individual microchambers. For applications such as on-chip cell culture or high-throughput screening of cell populations within a lab-on-a-chip environment.