MIBE Seminar: Microrobotic Alginate Platform for Temperature Sensing and Guided Movement

Topic: Microrobotic Alginate Platform for Temperature Sensing and Guided Movement

Speaker: Philipp Harder, Doctoral Candidate (Özkale Group)

Date and Time: Tuesday, 28 June 2022, 1:00 pm

Abstract: The integration of hydrogel-based biomaterials in microfluidics has led to the discovery of extracellular matrix mimicking designer microgels that are highly appealing for applications in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and recently thermal and mechanobiology.  Alginate microgels have received great attention due to its excellent biocompatibility, ease of functionalization, tuneable biomechanical properties, and compatibility with microfluidic cell encapsulation. Moreover, alginate has recently found applications in small scale robotics by incorporating stimuli responsive nanoparticles into alginate networks. We propose a mobile plasmonic microgel platform capable of stimulating single cells via heat and force generation for thermal and mechanical characterization of single cells.  Using microfluidic fabrication techniques, hybrid microgels containing alginate, gold nanorods (AuNRs) and a temperature sensitive fluorescent dye, are fabricated. The resulting plasmonic microgels act as micron sized thermometers by taking advantage of the temperature dependent fluorescence of a fluorescent dye. The temperature is varied by benefiting from the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) of the AuNRs at the corresponding laser wavelength. The light addressable microgels offer guided movement at small scale through thermophoretic convection. This platform offers new ways in probing different cell systems in respect to thermal biology, mechanobiology as well as light guided movement for cell manipulation and in situ temperature monitoring.