Review of cell and particle trapping in microfluidic systems

The ability to obtain ideal conditions for well-defined chemical microenvironments and controlled temporal chemical and/or thermal variations holds promise of high-resolution cell response studies, cell-cell interactions or e.g. proliferation conditions for stem cells. It is a major motivation for the rapid increase of lab-on-a-chip based cell biology research. In view of this, new chip-integrated technologies are at an increasing rate being presented to the research community as potential tools to offer spatial control and manipulation of cells in microfluidic systems. This is becoming a key area of interest in the emerging lab-on-a-chip based cell biology research field. This review focuses on the different technical approaches presented to enable trapping of particles and cells in microfluidic system. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.