LAUSR

It has been over 70 years since Dr. Herbert A. Pohl discovered the phenomenon of Dielectrophoresis [1]. Although this discovery lay dormant for three decades, its renaissance during the 1980s – caused by the surge of microfluidics – confirmed dielectrophoresis as one of the main pillars in microscale and miniaturization techniques. Dielectrophoresis keeps growing as one of the main fields in microfluidics. Novel applications and systems are reported every year, along with a plethora of conference presentations on dielectrophoresis. The biannual Dielectrophoresis Meeting series that started at the Institute of Physics in London in 2014 successfully held its third meeting in 2018 at the University of Surrey, co-organized by the Institute of Physics; and its fourth instalment (delayed by COVID-19) will be held in Flagstaff Arizona on July 26–28, 2021 (https://dep2020.org/). We are delighted to present to our readers the sixth instalment of the Dielectrophoresis special issues series in ELECTROPHORESIS that started in 2011; the previous special issues of this series [2–7] were very well received by our scientific community. The 2021 Special Issue on Dielectrophoresis contains 10 valuable contributions from research groups from across the world. These contributions are divided into three categories: (i) Review Articles; (ii) Fundamentals; and (iii) Clinical and Bioanalytical Assessments. The first section features five review articles that span from developments in the theory of electrokinetics to clinical applications. The first review article covers the latest advancements on the dielectrophoretic behavior of proteins, an ever-evolving topic. The second article discusses the advancements in dielectrophoresis during the last decade, highlighting biological and clinical applications; while the third article is focused on the recent innovations in reducing stimulation voltage requirements in dielectrophoresis-driven system, with special focus on point-of-care devices. The last two review articles in this section also have a bioanalytical and clinical focus, as they describe the analysis of microorganisms and the assessment of cancer cells, respectively, with dielectrophoretic devices. The second section, focused on fundamentals, contains three contributions. The first article describes the enrichment of nanoparticles by exploiting Joule heating effects. The second contribution presents a study on hierarchical assembly of anisotropic particles. The last contribution in this section is focused on the development of a dielectrophoretic corral trap for single particle capture. The third and last section contains two articles focused on clinical and bioanalytical assessments. The first article illustrates the sorting and characterization of bacterial cells (Cupriavidus necator) based on uptake of rare-earth elements. The last contribution of this special issue describes the of a microfluidic-based impedance sensor with on-chip oxygen control for the dielectric characterization of sickle cells. We would like to express our greatest appreciation to all the contributors for their excellent articles. We gratefully acknowledge the excellent and generous work and dedication of our reviewers. Thanks again to our authors, reviewers and the entire microscale electrokinetics community for the support that made the special issue Dielectrophoresis 2021 possible.