Optical micromanipulation and analysis of single cells on a microchip platform

Ongoing efforts to engineer a system capable of selecting and labeling single cells using optical micromanipulation tools and performing electrophoretic separation on the contents of a single cell using the "lab-on-a-chip" format are presented. At the heart of this design, are channels with IQ pm diameter cross-sections, etched using a molecular fluorine laser. Individual cells are moved on the microchip using optical tweezers. These single cells are brought into contact with a liposome containing fluorescent tags. The liposome and cell are fused using optical scissors; resulting in a cell with labeled components. This cell is lysed using the optical scissors, and high voltage is applied to separate the contents. This design will allow us to directly look at protein and mRNA expression from a single cell without amplifying the contents of interest, as well as to obtain the population averages and their variations from the analysis of a sufficient number of individual cells.