Ferromagnetic glass-coated microwires for cell manipulation

•Fe- and Co-based glass-coated magnetic microwires were used for cell manipulation;•Microwires create a strong and well-localized magnetic field at the ends;•Two concepts of manipulator systems which require specific magnetic properties were discussed;•1D-manipulation constitutes the use of a single microwire as a pin system;•2D-manipulation system should contain at least three microwires operated individually;•The choice of microwire for certain applications is correlated with their magnetic microstructure. The application of magnetic nanoparticles allows labeling the cell for its manipulation via the external magnetic field. In this work, it is proposed to use glass-coated magnetic microwires as a magnetic pin system to create a strong and well-localized magnetic field at the end of such microwires. Magnetic microwires manufactured by the Taylor − Ulitovsky method exhibit tunable magnetic properties correlated with their unique micromagnetic structure. The control of magnetic properties can be achieved by, for example, the chemical composition of the wire: Fe-based microwire shows bistable hysteresis and thus strong stray fields at the ends, while Co-based one demonstrates S-shaped hysteresis with almost zero remanent magnetization because of a closed domain structure. In this research, we discovered by theoretical calculation and experiments the usability of both kinds of microwires for different approaches of cell manipulations.