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Acoustic tweezers for advancing precision biology and medicine

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 5, Article number: 49 (2025) Cite this article

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Abstract

Acoustic tweezers are devices that use acoustic waves for contactless particle trapping and manipulation. They provide advantages typical of ultrasound-based techniques, such as minimal thermal effects and high biocompatibility, making them ideal for handling fragile biological samples. By using different transducer configurations and adjusting acoustic parameters, acoustic tweezers can operate on particles across various scales — from nanometres to millimetres — meeting several engineering, biological and medical needs. However, the use of acoustic tweezers in biomedical contexts still requires further optimization to broaden their applications and achieve an impact comparable to that of optical tweezers. This Primer discusses the fundamental principles of acoustic tweezers and outlines their typical experimental set-ups. We showcase advances in applications such as force spectroscopy, single-cell analysis, tissue engineering, organismal studies and in vivo procedures. Additionally, we address reproducibility challenges, suggest data-sharing standards and examine current technological limitations. Our goal is to empower researchers with the foundational knowledge needed to effectively apply acoustic tweezers, fostering their broader adoption in precision biology and medicine.

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Fig. 1: Acoustic tweezers in precision biology and medicine.
Fig. 2: Two-dimensional in-plane acoustic tweezers.
Fig. 3: Three-dimensional beam-forming acoustic tweezers.
Fig. 4: Schematic of acoustic tweezers applications.
Fig. 5: Representative results from applications of acoustic tweezers.
Fig. 6: Examples of acoustic tweezers in precision biology and medicine.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge support from the National Institutes of Health (R01GM141055 (T.J.H.), R01GM132603 (T.J.H.), R01HD103727 (T.J.H.), R01GM143439 (T.J.H.), R01GM135486 (T.J.H.), R44AG063643 (T.J.H.), R44OD024963 (T.J.H.), R44HL140800 (T.J.H.) and (R01GM145960 (L.P.L.)), and the National Science Foundation (CMMI-2104295 (T.J.H.)). The authors also acknowledge BioRender.com for the creation of images.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Shujie Yang, Joseph Rufo, Ying Chen & Tony Jun Huang

  2. Division of Engineering in Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Shujie Yang & Luke P. Lee

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Shujie Yang

  4. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Chuyi Chen

  5. School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Bruce W. Drinkwater

  6. Department of Bioengineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Luke P. Lee

  7. Institute of Quantum Biophysics, Department of Biophysics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea

    Luke P. Lee

  8. Department of Chemistry and Nanoscience, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea

    Luke P. Lee

Authors
  1. Shujie Yang
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Contributions

Introduction (J.R., S.Y., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); Experimentation (B.W.D., S.Y., J.R., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); Results (C.C., S.Y., J.R., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); Applications (S.Y., J.R., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); Reproducibility and data deposition (S.Y., J.R., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); Outlook (T.J.H., B.W.D. and L.P.L.); figure preparation (S.Y., C.C., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); manuscript revision (S.Y., J.R., Y.C., C.C., B.W.D., L.P.L. and T.J.H.); overview of the Primer (T.J.H.).

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shujie Yang, Chuyi Chen, Bruce W. Drinkwater, Luke P. Lee or Tony Jun Huang.

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Competing interests

T.J.H. has co-founded a start-up company, Ascent Bio-Nano Technologies Inc., to commercialize technologies involving acoustofluidics and acoustic tweezers. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Citation diversity statement

The authors acknowledge that papers authored by scholars from historically excluded groups are systematically under-cited. Every attempt has been made to reference relevant papers in a manner that is equitable in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and geographical representation.

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Nature Reviews Methods Primers thanks Daniel Ahmed, Hamdi Torun and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Glossary

Acoustic cavitation

The formation, growth and collapse of microscopic gas bubbles in a liquid due to exposure to intense acoustic waves.

Acoustic holograms

Precisely engineered phases or amplitude patterns that shape acoustic wavefronts into desired three-dimensional fields.

Acoustic lenses

Devices designed to focus or shape acoustic waves by altering their propagation path through the principles of sound wave refraction.

Acoustic phased array

A system of multiple acoustic transducers that emit sound waves with precisely controlled relative phase shifts to dynamically shape and steer acoustic fields.

Acoustic vortices

Swirling sound waves that carry orbital angular momentum, possessing a helical phase front that can trap, rotate or manipulate objects in fluids or air.

Atomic force microscopy

(AFM). A high-resolution technique that uses a sharp nanometric probe to apply force on a system and monitors the resulting deflection of the probe by collecting light reflected from it to infer mechanical properties of the system in analysis, such as stiffness, adhesion and elasticity at the nanoscale.

Bisymmetric coherent acoustic tweezers

Acoustic tweezers that generate twofold symmetric patterns by applying excitations with fixed phase and amplitude differences.

Breathing mode

A vibrational mode in which a circular or cylindrical piezoelectric transducer undergoes uniform radial expansion and contraction in response to an applied alternating voltage.

Depth of focus

The distance between the points near and far from the focal point within which the acoustic intensity remains sufficiently concentrated.

Inverse filtering

A technique for synthesizing complex signals by using a set of independently controllable sources, and solving the inverse problem to determine the optimal input signals required to produce a desired wave field.

Micropipette aspiration

A technique that uses a fine, sharp pipette to apply suction to a single particle or cell, allowing precise manipulation and measurement of mechanical properties such as elasticity and deformability by analysing the particle’s response to the applied force.

Optical coherence tomography

A non-invasive imaging technique that captures high-resolution, cross-sectional images of biological tissues using a low-coherence light source such as a superluminescent diode or a femtosecond laser.

Optical tweezers

Precise laser-based tools that use focused light beams to generate controlled optical forces to trap and manipulate dielectric particles.

Pressure nodes

Points in a standing wave where the acoustic pressure remains constant (minimum variation), as opposed to antinodes, where it fluctuates maximally.

Standing waves

Waves that remain stationary in space, for example, due to the superposition of two counter-propagating waves of the same frequency and amplitude.

Stiffness

A measure of the strength of the forces holding a particle within an optical or acoustic trap, defined as the restoring force exerted per unit displacement from its equilibrium position.

Thickness mode

A vibrational mode of a plate or disc piezoelectric transducer consisting of expansions and contractions along the plate’s or disc’s thickness direction, and generating longitudinal acoustic waves when an alternating voltage is applied.

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Yang, S., Rufo, J., Chen, Y. et al. Acoustic tweezers for advancing precision biology and medicine. Nat Rev Methods Primers 5, 49 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-025-00415-w

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