Algorithms for biological cell sorting with a Lab-on-a-chip

Automatic cell sorting and isolation for recovery of such live cells, mostly microorganisms, is a challenging task. Lab-on-a-chip devices implemented as cell arrays are used for this purpose. For an abstract model of the problem, we can assume the cell array to be represented by a matrix where each cell can be any of the three types: empty, good (or desired) and bad (or undesired). The problem is to separate the good and the bad cells by pushing them under electric field to their respective receptors at the corners of the cell array. We address some combinatorial optimization problems related to this biological phenomenon.