Saccharomyces cerevisiae is well-known in the baking and brewing industries and always used for the preparation of probiotics, especially its subtype, Saccharomyces boulardii, to prevent and treat various diarrhea and intestinal diseases. However, case reports on the side effects of a wide range of serious infections for the elderly, immunocompromised and critically ill patients after treatment with the S. cerevisiae have been increasing in recent years. The existing diagnose methods of the invasive S. cerevisiae infections in clinical, especially, the key step of the method—cell isolation, is time-consuming that always miss timey diagnose and early prevention. Here, we propose a new automatic micromanipulation method to label-free rapid isolation of S. cerevisiae based on the optically-induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP) technology, combining with image processing and recognition. S. cerevisiae is firstly identified by the image recognition method and then, automatically captured and moved to the target location by designing optical patterns. The results indicate the method can flexibly and automatically manipulate multiple S. cerevisiae cells simultaneously, such as, arranging S. cerevisiae cells, moving an array of the cells at any directions, aggregating the cells, and separating S. cerevisiae from the solution mixed with impurities. This work represents a step toward the use of automatic micromanipulation of ODEP technology to automatically and rapidly isolate S. cerevisiae for the detection of the invasive S. cerevisiae infections.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae在烘焙和酿造行业中广为人知，一直用于制备益生菌，尤其是其亚型Saccharomyces boulardii，以预防和治疗各种腹泻和肠道疾病。然而，近年来，关于老年人、免疫功能低下和危重患者在接受酿酒酵母治疗后出现多种严重感染副作用的病例报告不断增加。侵袭性酿酒酵母的现有诊断方法临床中的感染，特别是该方法的关键步骤——细胞分离，非常耗时，总是错过及时诊断和早期预防。在这里，我们提出了一种新的自动显微操作方法，基于光诱导介电电泳 (ODEP) 技术，结合图像处理和识别，对酿酒酵母进行无标记快速分离。酿酒酵母首先通过图像识别方法进行识别，然后通过设计光学图案自动捕获并移动到目标位置。结果表明该方法可以灵活、自动地同时操作多个酿酒酵母细胞，如排列酿酒酵母细胞，在任何方向移动细胞阵列，聚集细胞，并将酿酒酵母与混有杂质的溶液分离。这项工作代表了使用 ODEP 技术的自动显微操作自动快速分离酿酒酵母以检测侵入性酿酒酵母感染的一步。