Deformability cytometry project and presentation at CCBS retreat

This weekend, Cody Combs in the Zuzanna Siwy lab and I are going to present our work on telling cells apart by how they squish at the CCBS retreat. We’re both stretching out of our comfort zones on this project, and it’s been a lot of fun!

You can tell a lot about something by how squishy it is. Take an avocado for example: you can tell if it’s starting to get old by giving it a little squeeze, even though you can’t really tell by looking at it. Our goal was to do something similar with cells — squeeze them (gently) using microfluidics, and see if we can different populations apart using their response. People have squished cells before using things like AFM tips, but our hope was that doing things with microfluidics would allow us to look at lots of cells very quickly. To do so, we used the funds we got from a CCBS opportunity award to buy a used inverted microscope, rehabbed it, and outfitted it with the awesome Chronos 1.4 high speed camera. With this setup, we’re able to capture videos of cells in the microfluidic system at over 10,000 frames per second. Here’s an HL-60 cell going through one of the channels we designed:

That bullet shape it makes turns out to be exactly what we expect, thanks to work by our friend Sebastian Alland.

To get all this working, I grew cells up from a frozen vial we bought from Sigma, did surgery on a microscope, and used a LSM 780 confocal. I never would have had the guts to try without the skills I learned at the MBL physiology course!