Microfluidic cell fusion under continuous direct current voltage

The authors report a technique which produces cell-to-cell electrofusion using a common direct current power supply on a microfluidic platform. In the authors' method, the cells were first conjugated based on biotin-streptavidin interaction. The electrofusion was then conducted by flowing the linked cells through a simple microfluidic channel with geometric variation under continuous direct current voltage. This microfluidics-based technique offers processing at the level of single cell pairs with efficiency comparable to that of conventional electrofusion technique based on electrical pulses.