Low‐Invasive Cell Injection based on Rotational Microrobot

Abstract

considered as another powerful way to improve the penetration efficiency since the vision-based automatic injection would greatly reduce the operation failure compared with manual operation. [23,24] However, after many years' development, the optimization based on the above efforts has almost reached the limit, that it is very difficult to improve the cell injection efficiency further. Therefore, it is urgent for us to find another strategy, i.e., based on a novel principle, to improve the efficiency.If we look at electrical drilling machine, the object can be penetrated more easily via applying rotation movement, since the material is usually more sensitive to the shear stress caused by rotation. With the development of micro/nanorobotics, which includes robots that are micro/nanoscale in size and large robots capable of manipulation objects that have dimensions in micro/nanoscale rang with micro/nanometer resolution, [25,26] this paper reports a novel microrobotic-aided microinjection system (large robot capable of manipulating zebra fish embryo that has dimension in microscale range with nanometer resolution) with rotatory degree of freedom (DoF) to reduce the cell penetration force during the injection. The micropipette eccentricity error cancellation algorithm is developed to locate the micropipette at the rotation center and improve the rotation efficiency during the injection. To measure the physical damage and injection process of the cell, a lab-built force and image sensing system is proposed. Four types of micropipette, i.e., thick blunt tip (diameter ≈120 µm), thick beveled tip (diameter ≈120 µm, slant angle ≈40°), thin blunt tip (diameter ≈20 µm), and thin beveled tip (diameter ≈20 µm, slant angle ≈40°) are selected to validate our proposed method (noted that all places describing the diameter of the pipette in this manuscript refer to the outer diameter). Finally, the zebrafish embryo microinjection results demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of our proposed lessinvasive cell injection method based on rotational microrobot. The cell injection system mainly consists of control (PC controller), actuator (7-DoF rotational microrobot), feedback (optical microscope), and data collection modules (signal amplifier and digit precision multimeter) (Figure 1a). The rotational microrobot is composed of two parts, i.e., cell positioning manipulator (PM) and rotary injection manipulator (RM). The PC controller gives command to PM and RM drivers, which actuate the 7-DoF microrobot (Figure 1b). The robot initialization, cell positioning, and injection process can be obtained through the vision feedback via optical microscope (Sections S1 and S2, Figures S1 and S2, Supporting Information). DuringThe advancement of cell injections has created a need for accurate, efficient, and low-invasive injections. However, the conventional approaches to reduce cell damage during penetration, mainly optimization of micropipette tips and vision-based automatic injections, have almost reached the limit. Here, described ...

On-chip cell manipulation and applications to deformability measurements

“…In the last part of this section, we mention the micromanipulation techniques such as micropipette aspiration [22][23][24] or object handlings by microneedles [25], microknives [26], and microhands [27][28][29][30]. For more details of the nano/microrobots for the single cell analyses, see a comprehensive review [31].…”

Development of a novel monolithic compliant Lorentz-force-driven XY nanopositioning system

“…In recent years, ultraprecision manipulation with nanoscale resolution play an increasingly important role in biology science, manufacturing, measurement, etc [1]. For example, the advancement of low-invasive cell injection calls for an accurate and efficient operation of micropipette, which can be accomplished by a microrobot system [2,3]. Multiaxis * Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.…”