Biomineralization is a process in which organic matter and inorganic matter combine with each other under the regulation of living organisms. Because of the biomineralization-induced super survivability and retentivity, biomineralization has attracted special attention from biologists, archaeologists, chemists, and materials scientists for its tracer and transformation effect in rock evolution study and nanomaterials synthesis. However, controlling the biomineralization process in vitro as precisely as intricate biology systems still remains a challenge. In this review, the regulating roles of temperature, pH, and organics in biominerals forming process were reviewed. The artificially introducing and utilization of biomineralization, the bio-inspired synthesis of nanomaterials, in biomedical fields was further discussed, mainly in five potential fields: drug and cell-therapy engineering, cancer/tumor target engineering, bone tissue engineering, and other advanced biomedical engineering. This review might help other interdisciplinary researchers to bionic-manufacture biominerals in molecular-level for developing more applications of biomineralization.

We propose an innovative design of millirobot, which can achieve donor cell suction, delivery, and injection in a mammalian oocyte on a microfluidic chip. The millirobot body contains a hollow space that produces suction and ejection forces for the injection of cell nuclei using a nozzle at the tip of the robot. Specifically, a controller changes the hollow volume by balancing the magnetic and elastic forces of a membrane along with the motion of stages in the XY plane. A glass capillary attached to the tip of the robot contains a nozzle that is able to absorb and inject cell nuclei. The millirobot provides three degrees of freedom and generates micronewton forces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed millirobot through an experiment of the absorption and ejection of 20-µm particles from the nozzle using magnetic control in a microfluidic chip.

This paper presents a semi-automatic actuation system which can achieve bio-particles tracking, transportation, and high-precision motion control of robots in a microfluidic chip. This system is mainly applied in magnetically driven robots. An innovative manta ray-like robot was designed to increase stability of robots in a non-contaminated manipulation environment. A multilayer piezo actuator was applied to generate high-frequency vibration to decrease the friction between robots and the glass substrate. We also set up a user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) and realized robot tracking and predetermined trajectory motion through excellent algorithms using Python and C++. In biotechnology, precise transportation of cells is used for the enucleation, microinjection, and investigation of the characteristics of a single cell. Being optimized, the parameters of the robot can effectively reach 10 µm in actuation precision and a maximum actuation speed of 200 mm/s.