Femtosecond laser surgery on a chip for nerve regeneration

Nanosurgery using femtosecond (fs) laser pulses permits precise ablation of cellular and subcellular structures with minimal collateral damage and without compromising the cellular viability. Its nano-scale precision and minimal invasiveness allow for studying the cellular organisation from interactions of subcellular organelles to biological pathways. Fs-laser nanosurgery is versatile enough to operate subcellular structures either in cultured cells or living organisms. In the same way that recent advances in microfabrication techniques have impacted the electronics industry, microfluidics promises a great impact in fields ranging from analytical chemistry to biology and medicine. Microfluidic devices can increase throughput and decrease cost by densely integrating complex assays and analytical measurements in a chip format. Among the potential advantages of microfluidic devices, the use of parallel sample processing and/or automation make them ideally suited for high-throughput screening applications, such as DNA microarrays, enzymatic reactors, cell or larvae sorting, and stimuli testing. The merging of these two technologies, nanosurgery and microfluidics, makes large scale screenings with nanoscale manipulations possible and renders drug and gene screenings on biological phenomena such as nerve regeneration readily available and time saving.