Congratulations! 5 works from Cell Subgroup were reported in Microtas’ 2019 conference!

（1） Tingyu and Yaoping’s work about PVA-Functionalized filter for efficient cell recovery and release

This work reports a Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA)-functionalized filter based on an easy spin-coating process for effective cell capture and release. The PVA-functionalized filter (10-μm-diagonal-micorpore) realized a high recovery rate (82.7±6.4%) of cell separation from a large-volume liquid sample (105 A549 cells spiked in 5 mL PBS) by a gravity-driven filtration in a few seconds. And an easily-operated and rapid (soaking in PBS for 3 minutes) cell release was realized at a high release rate (96.2±8.5%), along with a high cell viability (92.7±0.7% verified via the trypan blue staining), which is critical for further downstream analysis. These results demonstrate the proposed PVA-functionalized filter will find promising applicability in target cell separation for liquid biopsy.

（2） Yaoping and Meixuan’s work about Kirigami-inspired mesh for rare cell recovery

This work proposes a Kirigami-inspired mesh to achieve an effective recovery of rare cell from whole blood. The shape and size of the micropores were well programmed via careful design of the geometric size of the Kirigami structure and accurate control of the strain loading of stretch. Two different shaped (diamond and hexagon) micropore arrays were successfully realized through the stretching operation. The applicability in rare tumor target retrieval was verified and the recovery rate of rare spiked cancer cell from undiluted whole blood reachedupto81.2±15.2%(67%strainfordiamond-shapedmicropore) at a high throughput (>18mL/(min∙cm2)).

（3） Tingting and Yaoping’s work about a circulating filtration system for cell recovery

Filtration has been widely known as a promising approach to effectively achieve rare target cell recovery from large-volume samples at a high throughput for liquid biopsy. This paper proposes a circulating filtration system to achieve the recovery of rare target cells at a high efficiency along with a high purity.

（4） Wenbo and Yaoping’s work about rapid separation and detection of rare fungi spores from whole blood based on a dual-layer micropore array filtration

This work reports a novel dual-layer filtration system including two membranes with different micropore diameters for rapid separation of fungi spores from undiluted whole blood. The upper membrane is for the depletion of white blood cells (WBCs) and the lower filtration membrane is for the recovery of targeted spores while depleting red blood cells (RBCs). The results demonstrated a rapid spore separation with high recovery rates (82.47%±10.90% from undiluted whole blood with rare spiked spores as targets), along with low blood cell contamination. The proposed system will be a promising point-of-care detection (POCD) tool for fungemia.

（5） Yaoping’s work about large-scale nanopore array based on a cost-effective shrinkage process for nanosized target separation

This work proposes a cost-effective shrinkage-based process for large-scale Parylene-C nanopore array fabrication from a prepared micropore array. The diameter of nanopore was well controlled via tuning the shrinkage thickness. Large-scale (>1 cm2) and uniformly-distributed nanopore arrays with different diameters (100‒900 nm) and only a small thickness (<8 μm) are successfully achieved. The prepared nanopore array was packaged with a home-designed gadget for nanoparticle recovery (104 in 1 mL PBS) through a filtration driven by a centrifugation (200 rpm@1 min). A good performance in nanoparticle recovery is well demonstrated, which indicates the promising applicability in exosome separation for liquid biopsy.