According to MIT Technology Review, Seok Hyun Yun and Matjaž Humar stimulated spheres of fat inside porcine cells with an optical fibre, causing them to emit laser light. When a much-needed external heart beat of light was also given to the drip, the cells bestowed upon off a reduce smirk of light. These too emitted lasers when they were hit with non-laser light. The researchers’ report has received Advance Online Publication in Nature Photonics. But this first-generation cellular laser required a laser cavity consisting of a pair of mirrors placed outside the cell to generate laser light.
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Scientists have turned individual cells into miniature lasers by injecting them with droplets of oil or fat mixed with a fluorescent dye that can be activated by short pulses of light. Changes in the shape of the droplet induced by miniscule pressure alterations within the cell altered the spectra of light emitted, and those alterations could be readily measured. In theory, using different combinations of beads and dyes with different spectral properties should make it possible to individually tag nearly as many cells as exist in the human body.
Lastly, the Harvard team used the fat cells of pig skin.
Researchers Matjaz Humar and Seok Hyun Yun at Harvard Medical School uncovered three ways to turn human cells into functional lasers.
Biologists often choose lasers to effectively study cells. In current imaging techniques, dyed cells emit a broad range of wavelengths, making it hard to distinguish one cell from another.
Humar told New Scientist that the process was “actually super-easy”. “They could eventually provide remote sensing inside the human body without the need for sample collection”. Cells are smart machines, and we are interested in exploiting their wonderful capabilities by developing smart-cell lasers that might be able to find diseases and fire light at them on their own.
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One day, they say, intracellular lasers could even help determine what a cancer cell is made of, by allowing doctors to analyze the interior with the laser light instead of a biopsy.
