(84c) Continuous and Rapid Separation of Bio-Soft Matters Using Microfluidic Systems

Biological soft matters such as cells, organelles, vesicles, supramolecules or macromolecules derived from various organisms have structures over hundreds of nano-meter in scale, but they are precisely assembled and highly integrated in nature. A size-dependent separation or classification of such a small biological structures is one of the most important procedures in biochemical, environmental, or medical analyses and their applications. In recent years, several purely-hydrodynamic methods have been proposed for continuous particle-classification not utilizing any outer fields such as electrical, magnetic, and gravitational, etc. Our group also proposed a novel method for continuous, rapid and precise particle separation, named Pinched Flow Fractionation (PFF) [1-3] and Hydrodynamic Filtration (HDF) [4-5]. Several applications of these systems have been demonstrated for the separation of various kinds of biological materials and polymer particles [6-10].

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