The recovery of single circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the peripheral blood of cancer patients has great potential for the study of cell heterogeneity and cancer metastasis and the development of personalized cancer immunotherapy. Here we present nozzleless droplet generation with focused acoustic beams for cell encapsulation. The mechanism of droplet generation is sensitive to the pulse width and the droplet diameter ranges from 350 to 550 μm. The pulse width duration (520 μs) and cell concentration (5 10³ cells ml⁻¹) can be adjusted to obtain the maximum probability (11.61%) of single cell encapsulation. Three-color fluorescence is used to identify encapsulated cells in the droplet and target cells are extracted by microcapillarity for conducting single cell analysis. The reported method of using acoustic tweezers to eject the droplet has advantages of convenience, speed and biocompatibility while being non-invasive, and could become a powerful tool for encapsulating single CTCs.

从癌症患者外周血中回收单个循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）对于研究细胞异质性和癌症转移以及个性化癌症免疫疗法的发展具有巨大潜力。在这里，我们介绍了聚焦管束声束的无喷嘴液滴产生。液滴产生的机制是脉冲宽度和350〜550中的液滴直径范围敏感μ米。的脉冲宽度的持续时间（520 μ S）和细胞浓度（5×10 ³细胞毫升^-1）可以进行调整以获得单细胞封装的最大概率（11.61％）。三色荧光用于鉴定液滴中的包封细胞，并通过微毛细作用提取靶细胞以进行单细胞分析。所报道的使用声镊喷射液滴的方法具有非侵入性的便利，速度和生物相容性的优点，并且可以成为封装单个CTC的有力工具。