DISPERSION-FREE INERTIAL FOCUSING (DIF) FOR HIGH-YIELD SINGLE-CELL ANALYSIS OF POLYDISPERSE PARTICLES

This paper reports an improved inertial focusing method for aligning naturally polydisperse microparticles, particularly biological cells, onto a single plane.In stark contrast to the state-of-the-art designs, it prevents separation of particle of different sizes by compensating the inherent dispersion of inertial forces.This unique compensation significantly enhances the tolerance to sample polydispersity by 2.5-fold while preserving the high throughput operation (>5,000 cells/s) and low error rate (<5%) to enable high-yield single-cell analysis.