Title
Robotic Control of a Magnetic Swarm for On-Demand Intracellular Measurement.
Abstract
In biology, fluorescent dyes are routinely used for biochemical measurements such as pH and ion concentrations. They, especially when used for detecting a low concentration of ions, suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR); and increasing the concentration of fluorescent dyes causes more sever cytotoxicity. We invented a new approach that uses a low amount of fluorescent dye-coated magnetic nanoparticles for on-demand, accurately aggregating the nanoparticles and thus fluorescent dyes in a local region inside a cell for intracellular measurement. Experiments proved this approach is capable of achieving a significantly higher SNR and lower cytotoxicity. Different from existing magnetic micromanipulation systems that generate large swarms (several microns and above) or cannot move the generated swarm to an arbitrary position, we developed a five-pole magnetic micromanipulation system and technique for generating a small swarm (e.g., 1 µm; capable of generating a magnetic swarm from 0.52 µm to 52.7 µm with an error \u003c7.5 %) and accurately positioning the small swarm (position control accuracy: 0.76 µm). As an example, the system performed intracellular pH mapping using a 1 µm swarm of pH sensitive fluorescent dye-coated magnetic nanoparticles. The swarm had an SNR inside a cell 10 times that by the traditional method, i.e., global dye treatment, with both cases using the same fluorescent dye concentration. Our intracellular measurement results, for the first time, quantitatively revealed the existence of pH gradient and polarized pH distribution in live migrating cells.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197532
ICRA
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
2020
1
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
4
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xian Wang15213.41
Tiancong Wang282.81
Guanqiao Shan353.11
Junhui Law410.70
Changsheng Dai5124.67
Zhuoran Zhang6154.47
Yu Sun700.34