Optical Tweezers to Aid With Cell Movement
By Lulu, Ishita
Introduction: Cell manipulation is an essential part of medicine because of its ability to aid in cancer treatment, genetic disease therapy, and more. It is typically performed using glass pipettes. However, because of the fragility of the cell and the difficulty in achieving a stable position, it is often difficult for glass pipettes to accurately manipulate cells. To solve this, a proposed solution is the use of optical tweezers. Optical tweezers are highly focused laser beams capable of trapping and moving microscopic objects. By integrating optical tweezers with glass pipettes, this project aims to enhance the precision, stability, and overall success rate of single-cell manipulation. This system not only minimizes mechanical stress and cell damage, but also opens new possibilities for advancing research in areas ranging from stem cell biology to targeted genetic modification.
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project comes from its effort to integrate two fundamentally different manipulation techniques into a single experimental platform. Traditional glass pipettes are based on suction and mechanical positioning, but this approach introduces shear forces that can destabilize the cell or rupture its membrane. Optical tweezers, in contrast, exploit the radiation pressure of a tightly focused laser to generate gradient forces that trap particles near the beam waist with nanometer-scale precision. However, tweezers alone are often limited by trap stiffness when applied to larger or irregularly shaped cells. By combining the localized suction control of pipettes with the non-contact trapping forces of optical tweezers, this project seeks to overcome the limitations of both methods. The technical goal is to establish a dual-manipulation system capable of stabilizing a cell in three dimensions while minimizing mechanical stress. Such an approach provides a unique testbed for quantifying the limits of laser trapping forces, calibrating pipette suction under controlled conditions, and ultimately expanding the toolkit for single-cell manipulation in ways that could not be achieved by either technology in isolation.
Broader Impact: This project combines optical tweezers with glass pipettes to manipulate single cells, such as amoeba, with the goal of improving precision while reducing stress on the cells. This approach could make experiments in cancer research, stem cell biology, and regenerative medicine more reliable, as these cells are often fragile and difficult to control. It could also help in gene therapy, drug development, and synthetic biology by providing a more consistent way of handling cells. Beyond these immediate applications, the system offers a way to connect physics, engineering, and biology in practice. Developing it could lead to new laboratory techniques, improve reproducibility between experiments, and expand the tools available for high-precision cell studies. Overall, this work has the potential to benefit both ongoing research and training in biophysics and biomedical engineering.