They create a miniature tractor beam for biological particles

Oct. 3 () –

MIT researchers have developed a “tractor beam” miniature based on a chip that will allow studying DNA, classifying cells and investigating disease mechanisms.

The device, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, uses a beam of light emitted by a silicon photonic chip to manipulate particles millimeters from the chip’s surface. Light can penetrate glass coverslips that protect samples used in biological experiments, allowing the cells to remain in a sterile environment.

Traditional optical tweezers, which trap and manipulate particles using light, typically require bulky microscope setups, but chip-based optical tweezers could offer a more compact, mass-produced, widely accessible, high-performance solution for optical manipulation in biological experiments.

However, other similar integrated optical tweezers can only capture and manipulate cells that are very close to or directly on the chip surface. This contaminates the chip and can stress the cells, which limits compatibility with standard biological experiments.

Using a system called integrated phased optical array, researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have developed a new type of integrated optical tweezers that allows trapping and clamp cells more than a hundred times farther from the chip surface.

“This work opens up new possibilities for chip-based optical tweezers by allowing cells to be trapped and clamped at much greater distances than previously demonstrated. It is exciting to think about the different applications this technology could enable,” he says. in a statement Jelena Notaros, Robert J. Shillman Professional Development Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and member of the Electronics Research Laboratory.

The research appears in Nature Communications.