Microfluidics assisted cell engineering and manipulation

The study of small-scale fluid manipulation in channels with a micron-sized cross section is known as microfluidics. The advantage of microfluidics is the usage of extremely small sample volumes and has utmost precision over the fluids due to microscale behavior, which frequently exhibits laminar flow properties. Microfluidics, which dates to the 1950s, is still a relatively new field. Microfluidics, on the other hand, has been firmly entrenched in the industrial and academic sectors as a versatile tool as a result of its rapid development. Microfluidic systems have various advantages, many of which derive from their small size. These benefits involve quick and efficient computing and reaction duration, increased specificity, and mobility, fewer samples and reagents required, also cheaper costs. Furthermore, its ability to parallelize, multiplex, and automate adds value to this technique. Microfluidic methods are applied in a variety of research areas, including genetic analysis, proteomics, and molecular biology. Earlier, these techniques were applied in biodefence, molecular biology, and molecular analysis. This technology has provided various important characteristics such as the capacity to employ small amounts of samples/reagents, quick analysis times as well as laminar flow, which gives chemical environment control. Considering various advantages of microfluidics, all these benefits have characteristics that make cell biology. Microfluidics and cell manipulation technologies combination provides cell biologists with new tools and capacities. Owing to their ability to accurately control the microenvironment, and quick generation of a heterogeneous cellular ecosystem of multiplexing assay method, microfluidic technology combined with cell manipulation techniques serves a crucial part in a variety of applications in clinical research, biomedical engineering, and cell biology. In this chapter, we discuss cell manipulation methods based on various forces, such as acoustic, optical, electrical, magnetic sedimentation, biomarker-based, and microarray-based methods, which are designed for specific applications, such as alignment trapping, extracting target cells from heterogeneous cell solutions and cell focusing.