Ultra-wideband Electrical Sensing of Nucleus Size in a Live Cell

Recently, ultra-wideband electrical sensing has been developed as a fast, compact, and label-free technique to characterize a biological cell noninvasively and to extract its intracellular properties. This paper presents, for the first time, the use of the technique to sense the change in the nucleus size of a live Jurkat cell. The experiment is based on trapping and detrapping the cell by dielectrophoresis on a coplanar waveguide and measuring the return and insertion losses due to the presence of the cell from 9 kHz to 9 GHz. The results have been validated by traditional fluorescence microscopy. In the future, by extending the technique to detect changes in nucleus shape and DNA content, it could be used to distinguish cancerous cells from normal cells, for example.