Micro Rotatable Robotic System for Low Invasive Cell Injection

Cell injection is a critical requirement in biological fields, such for artificial fertilization,gene therapy, medical test and so on. In cell injection process, one core important step isto penetrate the cell membrane safely with invasive as low as possible. Generally, thereare two strategies to do so: 1) decrease the tip size of glass pipette by microfabrication.2) optimize the injection process by robotic automation. However, after several years’development, those traditional approaches have almost reached their limit for cellinjection improvement. Hence, how to improve the cell injection efficiency furtherbecomes an urgent and challenge work nowadays.If we look at nature, we will see we always add a rotation movement when wepenetrating an object, since the material is usually more sensitive to the shear stress.Therefore, we wonder can we improve the cell injection process by employing rotationalinjection? If so, how much improvement can we have? Next, can we develop a new cellinjection system based on that?In this project, we intend to propose a novel micro robotic system for rotational cellinjection to reduce the physical invasive and improve penetration efficiency. Firstly, wewill develop the robotic system with 7-DOFs, including one rotational DOF for micropipette, and integrate it with microscopy. Then, we will develop a microchip to transferand fix the cell for injection process. In addition, we will develop a force sensing systemto detect the penetration force dynamically. After that, we will study how the rotationparameters affect the injection and then to optimize the injection process. Lastly, we willdevelop a prototype of the cell injection system.The successful implementation of this project will have long-term impacts in manyaspects: it will provide a new sight for the low-invasive cell injection; will reveal therole of shear stress in cell membrane penetration; will deliver a prototype of cellinjection system with high potential for commercialization in the near future.Consequently, we believe this proposal will lead to an automatic, high efficient and low-invasivemicro rotatable robotic system for cell injection, which would not only promotethe fundamental biology research and practical biomedical practices, but also deliver thenext generation cell injection system for commercialization.?