Abstract
Recent trends on microbiology point out the urge to develop optical micro-tools with multifunctionalities such as simultaneous manipulation and sensing. Considering that miniaturization has been recognized as one of the most important paradigms of emerging sensing biotechnologies, optical fiber tools, including Optical Fiber Tweezers (OFTs), are suitable candidates for developing multifunctional small sensors for Medicine and Biology. OFTs are flexible and versatile optotools based on fibers with one extremity patterned to form a micro-lens. These are able to focus laser beams and exert forces onto microparticles strong enough (piconewtons) to trap and manipulate them. In this paper, through an exploratory analysis of a 45 features set, including time and frequency-domain parameters of the back-scattered signal of particles trapped by a polymeric lens, we created a novel single feature able to differentiate synthetic particles (PMMA and Polystyrene) from living yeasts cells. This single statistical feature can be useful for the development of label-free hybrid optical fiber sensors with applications in infectious diseases detection or cells sorting. It can also contribute, by revealing the most significant information that can be extracted from the scattered signal, to the development of a simpler method for particles characterization (in terms of composition, heterogeneity degree) than existent technologies.
Highlights
Recent trends on healthcare or microbiology industry point out the urge to develop micro-tools with a variety of functionalities such as simultaneous manipulation and sensing [1,2,3,4,5]
As previously reported in studies conducted by our lab [7,12,38,40], the polymeric spherical lenses fabricated through the guided photo-polymerization method described in Section 2.1.1 are able to stably trap and manipulate in 2D the three types of microparticles considered
The same outcome was observed for PMMA and PS
Summary
Recent trends on healthcare or microbiology industry point out the urge to develop micro-tools with a variety of functionalities such as simultaneous manipulation and sensing [1,2,3,4,5]. OTs were considered flexible and versatile micromanipulation tools for a wide range of application fields including Biology, Photonics, Microrheology, Biomedicine and Quantum Physics [7,9,10]. Due to their ability to exert piconewton forces, they can be used to trap, manipulate and study micro-sized objects, including synthetic particles, cells or even cellular organelles [1,7,8]. The most conventional OT setups (COTs) are based on complex and expensive configurations-including bulky laboratory equipment such as inverted microscopes-, being associated with focusing difficulties in turbid media and thick samples (e.g., biological cells and tissues) [1,7]
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