Robot-Aided Micromanipulation of Biological Cells with Integrated Optical Tweezers and Microfluidic Chip

In this chapter, a cell micromanipulation system combining optical tweezers and microfluidic chip is established, which exhibits the advantages of noninvasive cell contact and minimal contamination during the cell manipulation process. The cell micromanipulation system mainly consists of four modules: optical tweezers module, motorized stage module, computer vision module, and microfluidic chip module. Upon successful cell levitation from the microwell, multiple optical traps can be controlled dynamically to move these optically trapped cells into a certain structure prepared for further analysis or manipulation. After successful cell assembly, the next procedure is to precisely transfer these assembled cells to the specified microenvironment. The effectiveness of the proposed cell micromanipulation system with the enhanced cell sorting strategy as well as the novel cell manipulation tool is demonstrated by performing the experiments on yeast cells and human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). © 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA