Trapping and manipulation of individual cells in the crowd

摘要

Manipulating single cell with optical tweezers in vitro or in vivo plays an important role in biological research, whereas the manipulation of individual cells might be affected by the neighbor cells especially in the crowd environment. To overcome this problem, an annular beam formed by the far-field Bessel beam is introduced to serve as an optical shield to protect the target cells from being disturbed. We demonstrate that an individual cell can be trapped and manipulated through the crowd cells. What's more, the interaction between two cells can be investigated by using a dual-trap optical tweezers in the crowd environment with the help of the optical shield.