Strategies for dielectrophoretic separation in laboratory-on-a-chip systems

Dielectrophoresis--the induced motion of polarizable particles in nonuniform fields--has proven to be an effective method for the separation of bioparticles such as cells, viruses and proteins. In this paper, the application of dielectrophoresis in miniaturized laboratories-on-a-chip is discussed, and strategies are described for using dielectrophoresis both for the binary separation of bioparticles and for the fractionation of many populations in such devices.