Robotic Intracellular Pressure Measurement Based on Improved Balance Pressure Model

Intracellular pressure regulates cell physiological activities and impacts cell micromanipulation results. The measurement of intracellular pressure may reveal the mechanism of these cell physiological activities and improve the micromanipulation accuracy for cells. Current intracellular pressure measurement methods usually rely on specialized and expensive devices or have significant cytotoxicities on cells. In this article, a simple robotic intracellular measurement method based on an improved balance pressure model is developed on the traditional cell manipulation system setup. First, an improved balance pressure model is proposed to calculate the intracellular pressure. Then, a traditional glass micropipette is used as a probe to penetrate the cell membrane to measure intracellular pressure. After cell membrane penetration, the key parameters of the improved balance pressure model including the cell deformation and the moving distance of the gas–liquid interface (GLI) inside the micropipette are measured in time to calculate the intracellular pressure. The experimental results on porcine oocytes demonstrate that the proposed method has an 80% success rate at an average measurement speed of 12 s/cell. Furthermore, no intracellular pressure leaking was tested during the measurement process, guaranteeing measurement accuracy. Furthermore, an 87.5% survival rate of operated oocytes was obtained after the measurement, proving limited damage to cell viability. Our method is highly expected to be applied in biological applications requiring in situ measurement of intracellular pressure.