Automated Cell Biopsy Utilizing Micropuncture Technique

Single cell surgery such as manipulation or removal of subcellular components or/and organelles from single cells is increasingly used for the study of diseases and their causes in precision medicine. This chapter presents a case study of cell micropuncture technique to achieve automated organelle biopsy of single cells with dimensions of less than 20 µm in diameter. The complexity of spatial detection of the organelle position is reduced by patterning the cells using a microfluidic chip device. The motion control strategy developed in Section 9.3.2 was adopted to enable extraction of organelles, such as the mitochondria and the nucleus, from single cells with high precision. An image processing algorithm is also developed to automatically detect the position of the desired organelle. Experiments with automated extraction of mitochondria and nucleus from human acute promyelocytic leukemia cells and human fibroblast cells were further performed. Extraction is followed by biological tests to indicate the functionality of biopsied mitochondria as well as the cell viability after removal of mitochondria. The results presented here have revealed that the proposed automated organelle biopsy on single small cells is feasible combining with cell micropuncture technique.