Optimized microfluidic device for sorting choanoflagelates by speed

GASTON L. MIÑO; JAVIER SPARACINO; VERONICA I. MARCONI; ADOLFO J. BANCHIO; M. A. R. KOEHL; N. KING; ROMAN STOCKER

Roscoff

Taller; 2015 Internatioanal Choanoflagellate Workshop; 2015

Under diverse environmental cues, choanoflagellates Salpingoeca rosetta can differentiate in two types of solitary swimming cells: (i) slow swimmers with a feeding collar and (ii) fast swimmerswith a smaller or absent collar. Furthermore, it is known that under nutrient limiting conditions, choanoflagellates experience a haploid‐to‐diploid transition, evidenced by the presence of ?gametes? that aremorphologically different [1]. Therefore, an interesting question arises: is there a connection between the different swimming cells and the haploid cell (i.e. gametes)? As a first step to understand this possiblelink, we designed a microfluidic device that performs the sorting of choanoflagellates by speed.In this work, we present a microchannel geometry that was optimized using a phenomenological model for the cell dynamics, numerically solved using a Langevin dynamics scheme. For this purpose wecharacterized in detail the motility of both cell types, and use this experimental results as parameters in simulations, that otherwise do not have adjustable parameters. We show preliminary results of thesorting process, comparing experiments with numerical predictions.