A high density microfluidic device for cell pairing and electrofusion

Functional cell electrofusion consists in the union of membrane of two cells belonging to two different lines in order to combine their functions and their genetic information. This phenomenon can be induced thanks to pulsed electric fields that lead to the permeabilization of the plasma membrane of cells. Appropriate cell fusion requires correct pairing of the cells of the two different lines. We investigate in this paper the highly parallelized cell pairing and electrofusion on a chip. Different architectures are proposed and compared, which allow the precise positioning of cells in the fusion chambers by positive DiElectroPhoresis (pDEP). The electrofusion of cells that are paired is demonstrated on the chip.