Abstract
Optical tweezers provide a powerful tool to trap and manipulate living cells, which is expected to help people gain physiological insights at single-cell level. However, trapping and manipulating single cells under crowded environments, such as blood vessels and lymph nodes, is still a challenging task. To overcome this issue, an annular beam formed by the far-field Bessel beam is introduced to serve as an optical shield to isolate the target cells from being disturbed. With this scheme, we successfully trapped and manipulated single blood cells in a crowded environment. Furthermore, we demonstrated manipulation of two lymphocytes ejected from a lymph node independently with dual-trap optical tweezers, which paves the way for exploring cell interactions under living conditions. Such technique might be helpful in the study of how natural killer cells response to virus-infected cells or cancer cells.
Highlights
Since the pioneer work of Ashkin et al (1986), optical tweezers have emerged as an essential tool for manipulating single cells and performing biomechanical characterizations at microscopic level (Chen et al, 2007; Zhong et al, 2013b; Xie et al, 2018)
We demonstrated manipulation of two lymphocytes ejected from a lymph node independently with dual-trap optical tweezers
Optical forces exerted on micro-particles by the optical shield were calculated to analyze its capability for optical clearing
Summary
Since the pioneer work of Ashkin et al (1986), optical tweezers have emerged as an essential tool for manipulating single cells and performing biomechanical characterizations at microscopic level (Chen et al, 2007; Zhong et al, 2013b; Xie et al, 2018). Distinct advantages of using tweezers for these characterizations include non-contact cell manipulation, Piconewton force accuracy (Williams, 2002; Falleroni et al, 2018), and amiability to liquid medium environments (Zhang and Liu, 2008). Trapping, and manipulation of cells within living animals has been achieved using infrared optical tweezers (Zhong et al, 2013a; Johansen et al, 2016). The ability of manipulating single cells in vivo is urgently demanded to verify our knowledge acquired from the in vitro studies
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