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Tug-of-War Optical Tweezers to Control Cell Clusters
Optical tweezers are excellent tools for trapping and manipulating bacteria and cells. Dr. Z
Chen’s lab at COSE has designed what they called “tug-of-war” optical tweezers for assessment
of cell-cell adhesion - a key factor in biofilm formation. With customized optical landscapes,
they used the tweezers to pull apart cellular clusters, providing a new photonic tool for biofilm
studies. Part of the work has been published in Nature family journal Light Science &
Application and featured in Optics & Photonics News as one of the breakthroughs in “Optics in
2016”, and the most recent work was presented in OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the
Life Sciences in April 2017 in San Diego, California.
Figure 1: Different designs of optical tweezers. (a) An elongated object aligns along the single-beam optical trap.
(b) Dual Tug-of-war (TOW) optical tweezers trap an elongated object from each end and pull in opposite directions.
(c) Triangular TOW tweezers with three-fold rotational symmetry trap and stretch an irregularly shaped object.
Figure 2: (a) Composite image from experimental data depicting how two attached bacterial cells are trapped,
stretched, and eventually pulled apart by tug-of-war optical tweezers. The bottom-left inserts show the natural
formation of S. meliloti biofilms (milky residues) on the surfaces of glass culture tubes in different growth media
(LB: lysogeny broth; TY: tryptone yeast extract; PYE: peptone yeast extract). (b-d) Snapshots over time showing
TOW optical tweezers dismantling a cluster of S. meliloti cells.