New biodiagnostics based on optical tweezers: typing red blood cells, and identification of drug resistant bacteria

Measurements of optical tweezers forces on biological micro-objects can be used to develop innovative biodiagnostics methods. In the first part of this report, we present a new sensitive method to determine A, B, D types of red blood cells. Target antibodies are coated on glass surfaces. Optical forces needed to pull away RBC from the glass surface increase when RBC antigens interact with their corresponding antibodies. In this work, measurements of stripping optical forces are used to distinguish the major RBC types: group O Rh(+), group A Rh(+) and group B Rh(+). The sensitivity of the method is found to be at least 16-folds higher than the conventional agglutination method. In the second part of this report, we present an original way to measure in real time the wall thickness of bacteria that is one of the most important diagnostic parameters of bacteria drug resistance in hospital diagnostics. The optical tweezers force on a shell bacterium is proportional to its wall thickness. Experimentally, we determine the optical tweezers force applied on each bacteria family by measuring their escape velocity. Then, the wall thickness of shell bacteria can be obtained after calibrating with known bacteria parameters. The method has been successfully applied to indentify, from blind tests, Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), including VSSA (NCTC 10442), VISA (Mu 50), and heto-VISA (Mu 3)