Alaeddine Landoulsi

Tunable frequency resonant biosensors dedicated to dielectric permittivity analysis of biological cell cytoplasm

This paper presents an improved design of resonant biosensor, dedicated to dielectric analysis on biological cells at microwave frequencies. Such sensor uses the capability of microwaves to penetrate inside biological cells in order to interact with their intracellular content. Hence, individual dielectric properties of the cell cytoplasm can be known and then used as a signature of the cell pathological state (living or dead, malignant or safe...). In this paper is introduced a continuously tunable frequency sensor prototype, able to perform an accurate dielectric analysis over at least a 1GHz bandwidth while keeping enough sensitivity to detect and analyze a single cell. As a proof of concept, permittivity measurements have been led on calibrated size polystyrene beads: achieved results show good agreement with expected permittivity values. Finally experiments on Glioblastoma cells will be presented.

A microwave sensor dedicated to dielectric spectroscopy of nanoliter volumes of liquids medium and flowing particles

This paper presents a RF biosensor dedicated to the microwave dielectric spectroscopy on nanoliter volumes of liquids or to the detection and analysis on flowing microscale particles. This sensor uses a microfluidic network in order to guide the liquid and drive the particles to analyze. Once properly calibrated this sensor should allow measuring the intrinsic dielectric properties of unknown liquid medium and even individual characteristics of flowing particles. Indeed characterizations done on small volumes of liquids with this device showed a good agreement with macro scale measurements done using a coaxial probe. To demonstrate its sensing capabilities, experiments with polystyrene beads have been first performed and compared with 3D electromagnetic simulations which show that potential high detection sensitivity can be expected. This opens attractive prospects in the frame of microwave dielectric spectroscopy for microanalysis of various dielectric particles like biological cells as example.