What is it about?
This study presents an in-Petri-dish acoustic vortex tweezers platform that enables contactless, precise, multi-DoF, and multifunctional manipulation of micro-to-millimeter-scale objects in liquid within a Petri dish. This platform takes advantage of an acoustic holography-based module, which uses a 3D printed holographic lens to transform incident acoustic waves into a focused acoustic vortex beam, with the majority of energy confined in the beam while carrying orbital angular momentum. This beam has sufficient energy to transmit through the bottom wall of a Petri dish and create a ring-shaped acoustic potential well, which functions as an invisible end effector to trap a small object inside the well, as well as concentrate micro-objects to create an agglomerate. Moreover, the orbital angular momentum of the acoustic vortex beam can apply torque to the trapped object, enabling rotational manipulation of the object. Furthermore, our acoustic vortex tweezers platform, which integrates the acoustic vortex module and a 3-DoF linear motion stage, allows for in-Petri-dish translation of the acoustically trapped object along customized high-resolution paths within a plane parallel to the Petri dish's bottom wall. As the holographic lens is interchangeable, different lenses can be used to generate focused vortex beams with different topological charge numbers, thus creating potential wells with various diameters for trapping and manipulating objects of different sizes. Additionally, our acoustic vortex tweezers platform can be operated under an upright fluorescence microscope, thereby allowing for monitoring fluorescent signal changes during acoustic manipulation.
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Why is it important?
Acoustic tweezers, with the capability to manipulate tiny objects without physical contact, hold substantial potential for biomedical and biological research. However, current acoustic tweezers platforms face challenges in precise, selective, and multi-degree-of-freedom (multi-DoF) manipulation of objects in Petri dishes, making it difficult to integrate them into typical laboratory workflows.
Perspectives
With the presented diverse capabilities, we expect our in-Petri-dish acoustic vortex tweezers to emerge as a valuable tool for the contactless, high-resolution, programmable handling of tiny biomaterials in biomedical and biological research.
Dr. Teng Li
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Compared to previous acoustic vortex-based contactless object manipulation methods, our approach enables the manipulation of small objects in commercial Petri dishes, thereby minimizing cross-contamination, eliminating the need for customized microfluidic chambers/channels, and making it suitable for integration into laboratory workflows.
Luyu Bo Luyu Bo
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: In-Petri-dish acoustic vortex tweezers, Lab on a Chip, January 2025, Royal Society of Chemistry,
DOI: 10.1039/d4lc00799a.
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