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Bacterial inactivation via microfluidic electroporation device with insulating micropillars
Author(s) -
Pudasaini Sanam,
Perera A T K,
Ng Sum Huan,
Yang Chun
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
electrophoresis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.666
H-Index - 158
eISSN - 1522-2683
pISSN - 0173-0835
DOI - 10.1002/elps.202000326
Subject(s) - electric field , microfluidics , electroporation , enterococcus faecalis , rhombus , materials science , nanotechnology , optoelectronics , escherichia coli , chemistry , physics , mathematics , biochemistry , geometry , quantum mechanics , gene
Electroporation is a promising method to inactivate cells and it has wide applications in medical science, biology and environmental health. Here, we investigate the bacteria inactivation performance of two different microfluidic electroporation devices with rhombus and circular micropillars used for generating locally enhanced electric field strength. Experiments are carried out to characterize the inactivation performance (i.e., the log removal efficiency) of two types of bacteria: Escherichia coli ( E. coli , gram‐negative) and Enterococcus faecalis ( E. faecalis , gram‐positive) in these two microfluidic devices. We find that under the same applied electric field, the device with rhombus micropillars performs better than the device with circular micropillars for both E. coli and E. faecalis . Numerical simulations show that due to the corner‐induced singularity effect, the maximum electric field enhancement is higher in the device with rhombus micropillars than that in the device with circular micropillars. We also study the effects of DC and AC electric fields and flowrate. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of the DC field achieves higher log removal efficiencies than the use of AC field.