Cell immobilization and contour detection for high-throughput robotic micro-injection

Abstract

Micro-injection of DNA/mRNA/Morpholinos is a critical technology for biomedical engineering. When dealing with suspended cells, manual injection has a lot of defects such as low efficiency, poor reproducibility and tedious sample preparation procedure. The method of visual servo control has been adopted by more and more researchers, since its virtue of non-contact and low cost. However, the hard nuts such as NRT(Not Real-Time) and low-throughput have become the bottleneck in its further development and application. This paper presents a novel method of cell immobilization and contour detection for high-throughput robotic micro-injection, which is featured with an original 2-DOF parallel micromanipulator with a novel vacuum-based cell holding device, and a good cell contour detection algorithm. The performance evaluation of this algorithm is based on the processing of zebrafish embryos image, the experimental result demonstrates that it has a good performance for high-throughput robotic micro-injection.