Label-Free Discrimination of Human Lymphoma Cell Sub-Populations with Microwave Dielectric Spectroscopy

This paper deals with the label-free microwave dielectric characterization of B lymphoma cell lines, the OCI-LY7, OCI-LY10 and OCI-LY18 ones, and demonstrates that the technique is able to discriminate these three sub-population cell lines with their different dielectric properties. Proof is given that such a differentiation is not due to a variation of cell size, viability or cells concentration, but to internal molecular differences. This constitutes a major result as it demonstrates for the first time that microwave dielectric spectroscopy is sufficiently sensitive using dielectric properties variations to distinguish very similar biological cell lines of the same phenotype, B lymphoma cell lines in our case, whereas such a detection is traditionally performed with marker-based and costly equipment or using heavy genetic methods.