Cell Position Adjustment Method And System Design In Microinjection

With the birth and development of modern biotechnology, cell injection plays a more and more important role in biological, medical and other fields, as a typical operation of microscopic techniques. Currently, the technology commonly is manual manipulation. There are many deficiencies, such as low injection efficiency, operational difficulties, and cell damage, and so on. Cell position and attitude adjustment is the key to cell injection experiments. Whether cell position and attitude adjustment technique is appropriate directly determines the efficiency and success rate of cell injection experiments.Cell position and attitude adjustment technique can be divided into contact and non-contact adjustment techniques. Contact method normally brings some mechanical damage for cells. Non-contact method includes optical tweezers method, dielectrophoresis method, magnetic method, micro-fluidic method, et al. Compared with contact method, non-contact method eliminates the mechanical damage for cells, but it still has some disadvantages like low operating efficiency and poor regulation accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of the position and attitude adjustment of cells, which uses a holding micropipette to regulate cell position and attitude in two orthogonal planes until the position and attitude of cell meet requests of cell injection. It is so importance of realization of automated cell injection.In this paper, the cell position and attitude adjustment system is studied. First, the cell position and attitude adjustment mechanism is analyzed, and requirements of cell position and attitude adjustment system are proposed. On this basis, cell position and attitude adjustment system is designed, and the feasibility of the system is study by experiment. Achievements are as follows:(1) According to the cell position and attitude adjustment system requirements, cell adjustment movement was analyzed. Then the cell position and attitude adjustment technique was determined. and the whole design of the system was put forward. The image processing module of the system, system calibration, path planning and the method to fix and release cell were analyzed;(2) According to the whole design of the system, various parts have been designed and produced, including the production of end-effectors, the design and construction of Z-axis rotary platform, X-axis rotary platform and Micromotion platform. On this basis, to build a cell position and attitude adjustment system;(3) According to the functional requirements of cell position and attitude adjustment system, the control system was designed, including microscopic image preprocessing research, cell rounded edges of the central pixel coordinates extraction, microscope calibration, user interface design;(4) Based on the design of architecture and control systems of cell position and attitude adjustment system, the system was built. Conducted a shrimp eggs pose adjustment and microinjection experiments to verify the feasibility of the systems. In addition, the results were analyzed.Through the study of cell position and attitude adjustment method, this paper proposed the technique of cell position and attitude adjustment based on the end-effector to manipulate cell rotary motion. It is significant important for life science research that the adjustment technique provides an effective method for increasing automation of cell injection.