Scientists at MIT have successfully designed a miniature device that can handle cells and particles, just like the old "tractor beam" in Star Wars. This new chip-based technology can help make a difference in studying DNA, cell identification, and the exploration of various diseases.
Silicon Photonics: The Backbone of This Device
This silicon photonics-based device uses light beams to capture and move biological particles, cells, or DNA molecules. Traditionally, optical tweezers belong to the category of equipment using light for similar purposes, not unlike a bulky, complex laboratory setup complete with microscopes and other apparatus to generate and control the beam of light. This new solution is far more compact, costs less, and is much more efficient than the existing devices.
According to MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor Jelene Notaros, this device now lets biologists achieve optical trapping and tweezing without heavier optical systems. Now, the entire process is much simpler, thus allowing greater applications in more constrained settings as well.
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Chip-Based Tweezers Compared to Traditional Systems
According to Interesting Engineering, some of the main developments of the new device include a capacity to capture and move particles from a much farther distance compared with the preceding chip-based technologies.
Traditional chip-based optical tweezers had only been able to control particles that were near the surface of the chip. From MIT, the device can be emitted using a light beam from a silicon photonics chip that controls the movement of particles within a few millimeters, significantly widening its range of functionality.
In fact, the light sent out by a chip is very thin and can be transmitted through even glass coverslips used to protect biological samples. The cells under observation may need to be under absolutely sterile conditions in many biological and medical experiments.
Integrated Optical Phased Array Technology
At the heart of the chip-based system is Integrated Optical Phased Array technology using so-called tiny antennas fabricated on a silicon chip. The antennas are made through semiconductor manufacturing techniques, and researchers can control the light beam's characteristics by electronically modifying the signals sent to individual antennas.
This ability lets them capture and manipulate cells with very high precision at a distance that is considerable from the surface of the chip.
Applications in Cell Studies and Disease Research
MIT scientists found that the device could work on polystyrene spheres and had already manipulated cancer cells. However, finding this device was not an easy task as scientists faced challenges to overcome them. They faced problems such as determining semi-automated methods to track particles, computing trap strength values and finding ideal ranges for the same, and processing experimental data in the most efficient ways.
"No one had created silicon-photonics-based optical tweezers capable of trapping microparticles over a millimeter-scale distance before. This is an improvement of several orders of magnitude higher compared to prior demonstrations," Notaros said in a press release.
This tiny, but powerful device, has promising impacts on altering cellular process studies. Perhaps in the future, it may bring a technology to manipulate particles to a portable, versatile form that changes the study of disease, cell biology, or some other area in science.
