UHF-Dielectrophoresis Crossover Frequency as a New Marker for Discrimination of Glioblastoma Undifferentiated Cells

Abstract

This paper introduces the first results of dielectric spectroscopy characterization of glioblastoma cells, measuring their crossover frequencies in the ultra-high-frequency range (above 50 MHz) by dielectrophoresis (DEP) techniques. Experiments were performed on two glioblastoma lines U87-MG and LN18 that were cultured following different conditions, in order to achieve different phenotypic profiles. We demonstrate here that the presented DEP electrokinetic method can be used to discriminate the undifferentiated from the differentiated cells. In this study, microfluidic lab-on-chip systems implemented on bipolar-complementary oxide semiconductor technology are used allowing single cell handling and analysis. Based on the characterizations of their own intracellular features, both the selected glioblastoma (GBM) cell lines cultured in distinct culture conditions have shown clear differences of DEP crossover frequency signatures compared to the differentiated cells cultured in a normal medium. These results support the concept and validate the efficiency for cell characterization in glioblastoma pathology.