Massive Integration of Light Driving Gel Actuator for Single Cell Manipulation

Abstract

We propose drive method of on-chip gel actuator using light irradiation for massive integration of gel actuators. The gel actuator is made of temperature responsive gel and patterned on a chip with light absorbing material. Thus, it can be driven by irradiation of light to control its temperature. By using this method, we can selectively drive an actuator among massively integrated actuators by irradiating patterned light and it can be applied to high-throughput cell manipulations. In this study, we demonstrated an example of cell manipulation by using this method. We made a flow channel for cell transportation by irradiating light. We succeeded in making straight channel by irradiating actuators with sheet laser. In this channel, we observed that motile cells moved and we succeeded in trapping the motile cells by turning off the laser and swelling the actuators.