An optical fibre for trapping and manipulation of single cells

I’m interested in using optical manipulation techniques to handle, and to sense and interrogate, single cells and biological environments. In this talk I will introduce optical tweezers and tell you how optical fibre traps and fibre-based tweezers offer a number of advantages over conventional optical tweezers. One of the most important things about fibre traps is the ability to trap cells without depending on a high numerical aperture objective lens. We can completely decouple the trap from the imaging system so trapping can be performed under any microscope.

I will explain the fibre trap we have made and explain some experiments we have performed on a range of single biological cells including single cell Raman microspectroscopy to distinguish different cells without labelling. I will also discuss how we may perform in situ mechanical measurements (for example of collagen gels) using either conventional OT or fibre tweezers.