Optofluidic-based cell multi-axis controllable rotation and 3D surface imaging

Abstract

The controlled rotation of individual cells plays a crucial role in enabling three-dimensional multi-angle observation of cellular structure, function, and dynamic processes. Reported cell rotation techniques often struggle to strike a balance between high precision and simple control, and they exhibit limited control flexibility, typically achieving only uniaxial cell rotation. In this study, we propose a cell rotation technique in three dimensions based on optofluidics, which utilizes optical tweezers to immobilize the cell and exploits the asymmetry of the surrounding flow to drive cell rotation. By adjusting the focal position of the optical tweezers, cells can be positioned within various flow profiles, enabling control of the rotation speed, rotation direction, and rotation axis of cells. This approach simplifies the manipulation procedure, achieving desirable control precision and greater rotation flexibility. Using our approach, multi-angle surface imaging projections of target cells can be rapidly obtained, followed by capturing the cell contour data from the images. By combining the cell contour data with corresponding angular position information, we have reconstructed the 3D surface of the target cell. We have employed this technique in experiments for the analysis of red blood cell morphology. Based on the constructed 3D surface images of diverse-shaped red blood cells, we quantified structural parameters including cell surface area, volume, sphericity, and surface roughness, which demonstrates the potential application of this cell rotation technique for cellular morphological analysis.