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Abstract To release biosubstances, including drug molecules, DNAs, and proteins, at prescribed cellular and tissue locations with controllable rates is the Holy Grail of drug delivery that could enable an array of unprecedentedin vitroandin vivoapplications. Extensive research efforts have been focused on exploring innovative mechanisms and approaches for controlling biochemical release with prescribed dose, timing, and dynamics. Particularly, the utilization of electric fields to stimulate the release of biomolecules from synthesized micro/nanostructures has received considerable interest. In this review, we focus on the recent progresses in controlling the release of biomolecules with electric fields by a variety of mechanisms, including electrochemical desorption and actuation, electrically triggered erosion, and electrically driven nanopumps and mechanical motions. The research on external electric stimuli trigged biorelease has progressed rapidly and could make remarkable impact in single‐cell biology, cell‐cell communication, and drug discovery.
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Light‐Gated Manipulation of Micro/Nanoparticles in Electric Fields
The rapid development of micro/nanomanipulation technologies has opened unprecedented opportunities for the sorting, assembly, and actuation of biological and inorganic entities for applications ranging from live‐cell separation, drug screening, biosensing to micro/nanomachines and nanorobots. To this end, remarkable progress has been made in the development of efficient, precise, and versatile nanomanipulation techniques based on individual or combined chemical and physical fields. Among them, techniques that fuse light stimuli with electric (E) fields, have achieved impressive performance in the versatility, reconfigurability, and throughput in the manipulation of both biological and inorganic micro/nanoscale objects compared to those of many other manipulation techniques, by leveraging the strong optoelectric coupling effect of semiconductor materials. This work provides a review of various types of light‐gated electric manipulation systems – the working principles, experimental setups, limitations, applications, and future perspectives.
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- PAR ID:
- 10151353
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advanced Intelligent Systems
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2640-4567
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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