Trapping and Manipulation of Magnetic Particles
IPTeL Tracking ID: MS-CE-2018-068
The present invention relates to the field of the trapping and manipulation of magnetic particles in suspension in 3D. In particular, the present invention relates to the field of the trapping and manipulation of magnetic particles by means of parametric excitation.
The invention addresses an important drawback of magnetic tweezers, and enables the current invention to potentially replace optical tweezers in applications where photo-damage due to optical tweezers is an issue, or where the visibility of the particle is compromised.
Background
Magnetic tweezers have been employed in molecular biology, cell biology and polymer sciences, in applications such as unfolding of DNA and other macro-molecules, characterization of intracellular visco-elastic properties, and in force spectroscopy. Their domain of applicability overlaps with that of optical tweezers, and the two have occasionally been employed to complement each other’s capabilities
Magnetic tweezers offer some important advantages over optical tweezers, such as in the specificity of interaction, and absence of photo-damage to the manipulated object. However, while a dielectric bead in optical tweezers can be stably trapped in 3-D, a magnetic particle is unstable in static magnetic fields and requires the use of visual feedback for trapping
This is an important drawback since visual measurement of particle position, which is necessary for feedback control, can be compromised either partially or completely when the particle is buried inside a cell, or when it is desired to be guided into concave features of a sample.
Therefore the problem of trapping micro-particles in 3-D without the use of feedback control has not been investigated.
Technology
This invention provides with a new generation of scanning probe microscopes (SPMs) find applications in intracellular imaging and manipulation, and 3-D metrology of objects with occluding features. All of the applications of conventional magnetic tweezers can be realized with significantly greater compactness, speed, and reduced nonlinearities.
The magnetic particle can be employed as an end-effector for micro-robotic applications to perform manipulation tasks such as pick-and-place, pushing, rolling, indentation, and cutting.