| dc.description.abstract | The mechanisms and causes of aging, the greatest risk factor of disease, are poorly understood. For aging at the single-cell level, this lack of knowledge results from limitations in the methods traditionally used in cell aging studies, including inefficiencies of manually culturing cells and constraints in the number of cells that can be analyzed. Microfluidic technologies solve these deficiencies that have prevented researchers from fully understanding cell aging; therefore, in this study we develop a high-throughput microfluidic system that generates billions of replicatively-aged yeast cells for subsequent biochemical analyses. Our system leverages size-based differences of acoustic forces to remove smaller, younger daughter yeast cells and isolate a large quantity of bigger, aged mother cells. With this tool, researchers can potentially generate a large, highly pure population of aged yeast cells without the need for time-consuming, error-prone purification steps or genetic modification. Experiments with such a system may reveal new insights into aging at the cellular and molecular levels. This improved understanding of aging can be used for treating age-related diseases, including sarcopenia, osteoporosis, macular degeneration, neurodegeneration, and cancer. | en |
