A Novel Platform for Cell Impedance Spectroscopy

Current methods of cell culture are extremely labour intensive. Cells must be harvested, plated, fed, grown, passaged, counted and replated. Only then may they be tested. Once the relevant stimuli has been applied they must then be imaged or counted to determine the effect of such a stimuli. Factor in all the control tests and the repeats needed to demonstrate reliability and it quickly becomes an enormous task.<br/>To help solve this problem, we have developed a platform to enable continuous cell monitoring via impedance spectroscopy. Most impedance spectroscopy is done through bare electrodes made of an inert metal, usually gold.^[1,2] Our platform instead utilises a biocompatible polymer surface,^[3,4] above embedded silver electrodes to constantly monitor a cell culture, without the need for manual counting or imaging. This not only reduces the time requirement of an experiment, but it also allows more data to be collected, particularly where an applied stimuli has a real time response. The platform has successfully demonstrated that it may effectively differentiate not only between the presence or absence of cells on the surface, but also their relative densities. Future refinements may improve the sensitivity of the platform further, or even probe single cell behaviour.<br/><br/>[1] T. Chalklen, Q. Jing, S. KarNarayan, <i>Sensors</i> <b>2020</b>, <i>20</i>, 5605, 10.3390/s20195605.<br/>[2] S. Khoshfetrat Pakazad, A. Savov, A. van de Stolpe, R. Dekker, <i>J. Micromechanics Microengineering</i> <b>2014</b>, <i>24</i>, 034003, 10.1088/0960-1317/24/3/034003.<br/>[3] M. Smith, C. Lindackers, K. McCarthy, S. KarNarayan, <i>Macromol. Mater. Eng.</i> <b>2019</b>, <i>304</i>, 1800607, 10.1002/mame.201800607.<br/>[4] M. Smith, T. Chalklen, C. Lindackers, Y. Calahorra, C. Howe, A. Tamboli, D. V. Bax, D. J. Barrett, R. E. Cameron, S. M. Best, S. KarNarayan, <i>ACS Appl. Bio Mater.</i> <b>2020</b>, <i>3</i>, 2140, 10.1021/acsabm.0c00012.