Optical Tweezers in Studies of Red Blood Cells

Ruixue Zhu, Tatiana Avsievich, Alexey Popov, Igor Meglinski

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Optical tweezers (OTs) are innovative instruments utilized for the manipulation of microscopic biological objects of interest. Rapid improvements in precision and degree of freedom of multichannel and multifunctional OTs have ushered in a new era of studies in basic physical and chemical properties of living tissues and unknown biomechanics in biological processes. Nowadays, OTs are used extensively for studying living cells and have initiated far-reaching influence in various fundamental studies in life sciences. There is also a high potential for using OTs in haemorheology, investigations of blood microcirculation and the mutual interplay of blood cells. In fact, in spite of their great promise in the application of OTs-based approaches for the study of blood, cell formation and maturation in erythropoiesis have not been fully explored. In this review, the background of OTs, their state-of-the-art applications in exploring single-cell level characteristics and bio-rheological properties of mature red blood cells (RBCs) as well as the OTs-assisted studies on erythropoiesis are summarized and presented. The advance developments and future perspectives of the OTs’ application in haemorheology both for fundamental and practical in-depth studies of RBCs formation, functional diagnostics and therapeutic needs are highlighted.
Original languageEnglish
Article number545
JournalCells
Volume9
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

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