Magnetic microheaters for cell separation, manipulation, and lysing

Precise heating is important for biological culturing, biological characterization, and thermal lysis, while cellular manipulation has been an area of significant interest and has been explored by a variety of methods. In this work, we present a preliminary study of the use of metallic thermal probes. The probes were used for magnetophoresis and micromanipulation of magnetically labeled HeLa cells. The probes were also used for rapid thermal lysis of magnetically labeled cells in liquid. The ultimate goal of this work is to combine thermal probes with magnetic tweezers for sample enrichment, magnetophoresis, manipulation, and thermal applications.