New Airborne Cell Sorting Technique Breaks Traditional Limits

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Researchers from Beihang University have developed a new microfluidic platform that enables precise sorting of single cells in air, rather than inside conventional liquid-filled channels. The system can encapsulate individual cells in droplets, eject them into air along controllable paths, and selectively sort them using electrical forces. By freeing cell sorting from solid channel walls, the system achieves greater flexibility while maintaining high accuracy and cell survival rates.

Why it matters

Single-cell technologies have transformed biological research, but existing sorting methods often compromise cell viability, require labeling steps, or provide limited sorting accuracy. This new airborne sorting platform addresses these limitations, offering a more adaptable and gentle approach to single-cell isolation that could enable simultaneous separation of different cell populations from complex samples, accelerating workflows in diagnostics, drug screening, and personalized medicine.

The details

The core of the new system is a microfluidic device that generates droplets containing single cells using a co-flow of air and liquid. By precisely adjusting the pressure balance between two air streams, droplets can be ejected into air at different angles, creating multiple independent sorting paths in real time. Once airborne, the droplets pass through a sorting zone equipped with a cylindrical electrode that generates a uniform dielectrophoretic force to deflect non-target droplets into waste collection, while allowing target droplets to continue along their original path. The researchers achieved sorting accuracies exceeding 99% across all tested paths, with cell survival rates above 92%, and were able to separate multiple cell subpopulations simultaneously from a mixed sample in a single run.

• The study was published in November 2025 in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

What’s next

The researchers plan to further integrate additional optical channels or imaging-based detection into the system, which could expand its capabilities to even more complex sorting tasks.