Polysilicon chips for intracellular mechanics
By: Marta Duch and María Isabel Arjona.
The Mico- & NanoTooLs group (MNTL) has been developing a worldwide pioneering research line that started in 2005 miniaturizing silicon chips and their subsequent internalization inside living cells for sensing and actuation. Silicon-based barcodes for direct tagging of mouse embryos, intracellular pressure sensors to measure cell pressure from inside the cell or suspended planar-arrays that consist in a collection of multiple independent and ordered sensing features on a single device, allowing parallel assays are some examples of application.
This talk is focused in the two late devices that we have been developed.
As cytoplasmic mechanical properties and forces are essential for the development of living cells, a silicon–based H-comb device has been designed and fabricated. Internalization of these silicon-based nanochips on early mouse-embryo has allowed to track a mechanical program which is as necessary as the biochemical one for the development at the origin of a new embryonic life.
On the other hand, silicon-based chips, larger than cell mitotic diameter, are established for the first time as intracellular mechanical drugs. Once internalized, these tools disrupt the correct development of the cell inducing mechanical affection of the cell cycle and cell death. The intracellular mechanical drugs allow to study how intracellular mechanical cues define cell function with relevance to fundamental cell mechanics and nanomedicine, the lines where we are focusing now.