Cell motion in shear flow combined with Dean vortices strongly affects DNA transfer during flow-through electroporation
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Electroporation is widely used to generate nanoscale pores within the membrane under an external electric field, enabling uptake of genes. However, in a typical electroporation process, only a small fraction of the cell membrane is actually permeabilized to an extent that contributes to transfection. In here we harness inertial Dean flow effects that arise when the suspended cells are transported through a curved spiral-shaped microchannel to overcome this limitation. We observe a two-fold enhancement in transfection efficiency using this device, as compared with a straight microchannel. These results suggest a new and simplified approach to achieve greatly enhanced gene delivery by electroporation in a continuous high-throughput format. 2009 CBMS.