Manipulation of levitated cell aggregates by high frequency acoustic trapping

Abstract

Acoustic tweezers can levitate and manipulate a single object or objects through air and water. Compared to other tweezer technologies: optical tweezers and magnetic tweezers, acoustic tweezers have a huge advantage on trapping larger objects and generating aggregates with strong trapping forces. Moreover, trapped samples are not required to be optically transparent or labeled with a magnetic bead. Recently, acoustic levitation technique appeared to be promising in targeted drug delivery in human body, thus many levitation methods using ultrasonic wave including standing wave and surface acoustic wave have been developed. The single beam acoustic trapping has a definitive advantage over other methods since it only employs a single transducer. In present study, we demonstrated that single beam acoustic tweezers (SBAT) can levitate red blood cells (RBCs) aggregation in three dimensions and successfully performed the manipulation of levitated cell aggregation. This study is a significant step forward in manipulation of cell aggregates using high frequency acoustic tweezers.