Microfluidic Devices for Cell Screening Purposes

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, part of the scientific community has been moving towards the development of innovate devices for cell screening purposes that allow reaching unprecedented resolution and simplifying screening protocols. The detection of traces of biological species from biological samples is of extreme importance for the possible impact on human health. However, a great number of issues come into play before a biological sample may be used in routine screening procedures. The handling and analysis of complex biological samples, in which individuating a single component among a cluster of molecules is involved, is challenging and conventionally requires complicated protocols to pretreat complex samples. Screening is often translated in the detection of a few molecules in diluted solutions, which are invisible to the current sensors due to a limit in the resolution of analysis. Moreover, for some screening procedures, it is important to not affect the phenotype of the biological sample, especially for analysis over a long period of a specific sample (e.g., specific cell populations). Thus, it becomes important to introduce new methodologies, which are not invasive in respect of the analytes. Finally, the heterogeneity of behavior of the human body and its response to medical treatments requires the development of tools which are compatible with personalized medicine, and this is translated to the development of devices that are portable, fast, providing in parallel high-throughput and high content analysis with reduced costs. It then becomes important for scientific research and clinical diagnostic applications to obtain a sequential handling and manipulation of cells and cell suspensions.

Microfluidics is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the transport, manipulation, and analysis of small amounts of liquids, cells, and particles. These devices guarantee high portability, accurate control for handling samples, simplified sample pretreatment protocols, low consumption of samples and reagents, high resolution of analysis, and integration of sensors allowing monitoring of cells over a long period, in a label-free manner, to not affect cell phenotype and metabolism. This might help to overcome the aforementioned issues.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• microfluidics
• optical sensors
• cell screening
• microbioreactors
• lab on a chip
• optofluidics
• plasmonics
• nanodevices