Significance: Cell separation is a fundamental process in biomedicine, but is presently complicated, cumbersome, and expensive. We present a technique that can sort cells at a rate equivalent to or faster than gold-standard techniques such as fluorescence- and magnetic-activated cell sorting, but can do it label-free and with very low cell loss. The system uses dielectrophoresis to sort cells electrostatically, using an electrode chip that eschews microfabrication in favor of a laminate drilled with 397 electrode-bearing wells. This high level of parallelization makes the system immune to the bubbles that limit labs-on-chip, while also increasing capacity and throughput to levels comparable with high-throughput FACS and MACS, whereas the chip is cheap enough to be disposable, preventing interseparation contamination.

In this paper we show how simplifying assumptions can be used to extract useful data from the dielectrophoretic collection spectrum, in particular for the cytoplasm, and hence determine the properties of multiple populations of cells within a sample. Specifically, the observation of the frequencies of onset of dielectric dispersion allows the identification and enumeration of populations of cells according to cytoplasmic conductivity, with particular relevance to the determination of the action of drugs for high-throughput screening applications.

A rapid, low-cost and label-free method of cell analysis compares favorably to Annexin-V, MTT and trypan blue for assessment of apoptosis and IC ₅₀ .