Flexible, stretchable, on-chip optical tweezers for high-throughput bioparticle manipulation

High-throughput trapping and precision manipulation of individual pathogenic bioparticles in complex microenvironments are of great importance for in-vitro diagnostics and drug screening. Although optical tweezers have been widely used for bioparticle trapping and manipulation, the throughput, functionality, and adaptability are still limited for on-chip integrated bioparticle manipulation in complex and dynamic bioenvironments. Here, we report flexible, stretchable, on-chip optical tweezers (FSOT) based on large-scale orderly assembled microlenses for high-throughput manipulation of bioparticles in complex bio-environments and on flexible substrates, including soft bio-substrates such as skin and intestines. Large-scale (up to 1000) photonic nanojet effect of the microlenses enables high-throughput trapping, sorting, and modulation of individual bioparticles with sizes ranging from sub-100 nm to tens of micrometers, such as exosomes, bacteria and mammalian cells. Our FSOT exhibits high flexibility, which enables bioparticle trapping and sorting in complex and curved biological microenvironments. Importantly, our FSOT also exhibits high deformability and stretchability, which facilitates the control of inter-cellular distance between trapped neighboring cells, enabling real-time modulating and monitoring the interaction between single pathogenic bacteria and macrophage. Our FSOT represents a new class of on-chip optical tweezers for high-throughput bioparticle trapping and manipulation with the features of high flexibility and stretchability, and holds great promises as an integrated on-chip platform for high-throughput dynamic analysis of bioparticles, for revealing inter-cellular interactions between pathogenic bioparticles and host cells, and for precise drug screening.