Link to thesis in LUCRIS.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) carry biological information from their parent cell to other cells in the body. To intercept and decipher this information necessitates the isolation of EVs from complex backgrounds such as blood or spinal fluid. Acoustic trapping has been previously demonstrated as a promising technique for EV isolation from cell media, blood plasma and urine. The acoustic fields struggle to directly trap these nanoparticles, however the presence of seed particle clusters can enable sub-micron particles to be trapped. In this work, we combat the limitations of efficiency and throughput in acoustic trapping of nanoparticles by replacing polystyrene seed particles with silica seed particles.