Nanoscale Ligand Spacing Regulates Mechanical Force-Induced Cancer Cell Killing.

Cancer cells sense and respond to the extracellular environment, with differences in nanoscale ligand spacing affecting their behavior. Emerging reports show that stretch/ultrasound-mediated mechanical forces promote apoptosis (mechanoptosis) by increasing myosin contractility. Since myosin contractility is critical for nanoscale-ligand spacing-regulated cell behavior, we study the effect of ligand spacing on mechanoptosis.

Magnetically Actuated Cell-Robot System: Precise Control, Manipulation, and Multimode Conversion.

Border-nearing microrobots with self-propelling and navigating capabilities have promising applications in micromanipulation and bioengineering, because they can stimulate the surrounding fluid flow for object transportation. However, ensuring the biosafety of microrobots is a concurrent challenge in bioengineering applications. Here, macrophage template-based microrobots (cell robots) that can be controlled individually or in chain-like swarms are proposed, which can transport various objects.

Postoperative evaluation of tumours based on label-free acoustic separation of circulating tumour cells by microstreaming.

Metastatic tumour recurrence caused by circulating tumour cells (CTCs) after surgery is responsible for more than 90% of tumour-related deaths. A postoperative evaluation system based on the long-term dynamic detection of CTCs helps in guiding the postoperative treatment of tumours in real time and preventing metastases and recurrence of tumours after treatment. In this study, a simple, rapid, and low-cost postoperative evaluation system was established based on the number of CTCs captured by a label-free acoustic separation device from whole blood samples of mice, of which breast tumours were surgically removed, and tumour metastasis was successfully predicted.

Magnetically Driven Bionic Millirobots with a Low-Delay Automated Actuation System for Bioparticles Manipulation.

This paper presents a semi-automatic actuation system which can achieve bio-particles tracking, transportation, and high-precision motion control of robots in a microfluidic chip. This system is mainly applied in magnetically driven robots. An innovative manta ray-like robot was designed to increase stability of robots in a non-contaminated manipulation environment.

On-chip rotational manipulation of microbeads and oocytes using acoustic microstreaming generated by oscillating asymmetrical microstructures.

The capability to precisely rotate cells and other micrometer-sized biological samples is invaluable in biomedicine, bioengineering, and biophysics. We propose herein a novel on-chip cell rotation method using acoustic microstreaming generated by oscillating asymmetrical microstructures. When the vibration is applied to a microchip with our custom-designed microstructures, two different modes of highly localized microvortices are generated that are utilized to precisely achieve in-plane and out-of-plane rotational manipulation of microbeads and oocytes.