Topic: Light-driven microrobots and micromachines based on optoelectronic tweezers

Optoelectronic tweezers (OET) is a useful opto-electro-fluidic technology utilizing light-patterned dielectrophoresis (DEP) for fine and non-invasive control and actuation of microobjects. In the first part of this presentation, I will introduce an OET-driven microrobotic system, which can be programmed to carry out sophisticated, multiaxis operations. One particularly useful program is a serial combination of “load,” “transport,” and “deliver,” which can be applied to manipulate a wide range of micrometer-dimension payloads. The microrobotic system described here was demonstrated to be useful for single-cell isolation, clonal expansion, RNA sequencing, controlling cell–cell interactions, and isolating precious microtissues from heterogeneous mixtures. In the second part of the presentation, I will introduce the use of OET to drive multi-component micro-machines such as micro-gear trains and micro- rack-pinion systems, which were demonstrated for different applications in micromanipulation, microfluidics and microrobots. In the third part of this presentation, I will introduce the recent progress on the commercialization of the OET technology through the founding of biotech company Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI) These results demonstrated that OET is a powerful tool that can be used for many applications in the microscopic world for physics, engineering and biomedical research.