The research was published in Advanced sciencea peer-reviewed scientific journal. The researchers have applied for a patent on the technology.

The system can track, collect and accurately position insects and other organisms, whether they are stationary, in droplets or moving. The pick-and-place method, driven by real-time visual and spatial data, is adaptive and can ensure accurate placement of the organisms.

“The printer itself can behave like a human, with the printer acting as hands, the machine vision system as eyes, and the computer as brain,” said Guebum Han, a former postdoctoral researcher in mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and first author of the paper. “The printer can adapt to moving or stationary organisms in real time, and assemble them into a certain sequence or pattern.”

Normally this process is performed manually and requires extensive training, which can lead to inconsistencies in organism-based applications. With this new type of system, the amount of time for researchers decreases and more consistent outcomes become possible.

This technology could increase the number of organisms processed for cryopreservation, separate living organisms from dead organisms, place organisms on curved surfaces, and integrate organisms with materials and devices into customizable shapes. It could also lay the foundation for creating complex arrangements of organisms, such as superorganism hierarchies: organized structures found in insect colonies such as ants and bees. Additionally, the research could lead to advances in autonomous biomanufacturing by making it possible to evaluate and assemble organisms.

For example, this system was used to improve cryopreservation methods for zebrafish embryos, which was previously done with manual manipulation. With this new technology, the researchers were able to show that the process could be completed 12 times faster compared to the manual process. Another example shows how the adaptive strategy tracked, picked up and placed randomly moving beetles and integrated them with functional devices.

In the future, researchers hope to further develop this technology and combine it with robotics to make it portable for field research. This could allow researchers to collect organisms or samples from places that would normally be inaccessible.

In addition to Han, the team from the University of Minnesota Department of Mechanical Engineering included assistant professors Kieran Smith and Daniel Wai Hou Ng, assistant professor JiYong Lee, professor John Bischof, professor Michael McAlpine, and former postdoctoral researchers Kanav Khosla and Xia Ouyang. They also collaborated with the Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio).

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and Regenerative Medicine Minnesota.