Speaker
Cecilia Rorai
(Nordita)
Description
Living cells are usually immersed in fluids they interact
with. The nature of the interaction is complex and involves
biochemical and biophysical mechanisms. Even when the
problem is simplified to account for the hydrodynamical
aspects only, it turns out that cells cannot be regarded as
"passive". The fluid flow and the motion of the cell are
mutually and nonlinearly coupled due to the deformability of
the cell membrane. This leads to a multiplicity of hardly
predictable dynamical behaviors exploited by nature in
biological systems and by humans in microfluidic devices for
medical diagnostic. The problem is strongly dependent on the
flow geometry and the deformability of the membrane. We have
numerically studied flow geometries that allow for cell
alignment and sorting. We present and discuss some
preliminary results and we propose a microfluidic device
able to sort cells, modeled as elastic capsules, by
deformability.
