151 / 2024-05-10 14:50:44

Diverse Optothermal Tweezers: Facilitating Multimodal Bionanoparticle Manipulation and Biodetection

Optical tweezers,Biosensing,CRISPR,SPR

Optical manipulation technology leveraging temperature fields offers distinct advantages, including heightened energy efficiency and expanded manipulative capabilities for particles, thus transcending the limitations of conventional optical manipulation methods. This pioneering approach has witnessed significant advancements within the realms of optical tweezers and biomedical research in recent years. By harnessing optothermal phenomena to generate temperature gradients, we have spearheaded the development of an innovative nano-tweezing system propelled by temperature fields.

We recently introduced a highly adaptable optothermal nanotweezer (HAONT) for trapping, sorting, and assembling diverse nanoparticles of varying materials, shapes, and sizes (Advanced Materials, 2024, 36(9): 2309143). This system capitalizes on the synergistic interplay of thermophoresis, thermo-osmotic flow, and other mechanisms, enabling a diverse array of manipulations and identifications of bio-nanoparticles within the size range of 10 nm to 1000 nm.

Furthermore, we have integrated this HAONT with CRISPR biosensing systems. Remarkably, we established an optothermal scheme for enhancing CRISPR-based single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection at the single-molecule level, while also introducing a novel CRISPR methodology for observing nucleotide cleavage (Light: Science & Applications, 2023, 12, 273).

Moreover, our recent findings demonstrate that optothermal tweezers operating at low temperatures exhibit interesting performance. We anticipate that further advancements in this technology will enhance the capability to capture and detect ultra-low concentration biomolecules, and enable in-situ single-molecule analysis, thus making substantial contributions to the progress of biomedical research and its practical applications.