Engineered systems for the physical manipulation of single cells.

Manipulating the physical location of cells is useful both to organize cells in vitro and to separate cells during screening. The quest to manipulate cells on length scales commensurate with their size has led to a host of technologies exploiting optical, chemical, mechanical, electrical, and other phenomena. Researchers interested in organizing cells are gaining the ability to pattern more than two cell types, to create dynamic surfaces, and to pattern cells in the third dimension. In the realm of cell separation for screening, there has been significant progress in miniaturized flow-based optical sorters as well as in sorting following static microscopic observation.