Shashi K. Murthy, Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave., 342 SN, Boston, MA 02115, Milica Radisic, IBBME/Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, 164 College Street, Room 407, Toronto, ON M5S 3G9, Canada, and Brian Plouffe, Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave., 342 SN, Boston, MA 02115.
Microfluidic approaches to the separation of cardiac cell subpopulations offer significant advantages over conventional techniques such as pre-plating, cell straining, or fluorescence-activated cell sorting. These approaches are capable of handling small numbers of cells and high-resolution separation. The major application of microfluidic separation of cardiac cells is in tissue engineering, where enriched subpopulations of cells can be cultured in vitro to create functional units of cardiac tissue. This presentation will describe size- and adhesion-based approaches for microfluidic separation of cardiac cells.