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Sculpting and manipulating vesicle networks by Optical tweezers (OT) (CAT#: STEM-MB-1313-WXH)

Introduction

Vesicles are lipid bilayer-encased aqueous compartments that range from attoliters to picoliters in volume. They are widely used as model architectures in studying the biophysical properties of membranes, as functional units in biotechnology (e.g., for applications in bio-sensing, drug delivery and diagnostics), as miniaturised reaction vessels, and as soft-matter microsystems. These developments have led to increasing interest in using cell-sized giant vesicles as plasma membrane mimics in bottom-up synthetic biology, where they act as a chassis for artificial cells that contain biomolecular components and perform cell-mimetic functions.




Principle

Optical tweezers (originally called single-beam gradient force trap) are scientific instruments that use a highly focused laser beam to hold and move microscopic and sub-microscopic objects like atoms, nanoparticles and droplets, in a manner similar to tweezers. If the object is held in air or vacuum without additional support, it can be called optical levitation.
The laser light provides an attractive or repulsive force (typically on the order of piconewtons), depending on the relative refractive index between particle and surrounding medium. Levitation is possible if the force of the light counters the force of gravity. The trapped particles are usually micron-sized, or even smaller. Dielectric and absorbing particles can be trapped, too.

Applications

• Optical tweezers are used in biology and medicine (for example to grab and hold a single bacterium, a cell like a sperm cell or a blood cell, or a molecule like DNA).
• Nanoengineering and nanochemistry (to study and build materials from single molecules).
• Quantum optics and quantum optomechanics (to study the interaction of single particles with light).

Procedure

1.Sample preparation
2.Force Calibration
3.Measurement
4.Analysis

Materials

Optical tweezers
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