a/LCI Lets Scientists See Real-Time Changes in Nucleus
Researchers from Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have developed a new technology which enables scientists to watch changes in a cell’s nucleus in real time.
This new light scattering technology is called angle-resolved low coherence interferometry, or a/LCI for short. With a/LCI, light is shone into a cell and sensors capture and analyze the light as it is reflected back. Scientists using a/LCI can see changes in the shape of the nucleus as they occur without going through the painstaking process of staining individual cells at different stages.
While it typically takes about one day to process 100 cells using the conventional cell-by-cell process, a/LCI allows hundreds of cells to be screened in as little as five minutes – making a/LCI a potential timesaver for cancer researchers. As one Duke engineer said about the technology,
“We have already shown that it could act as an early cancer detection system by detecting pre-cancerous cells in linings of tissues. These findings will permit researchers to pursue more and different investigations at the cellular level.”
Adam Wax
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University Pratt School of Engineering
Kevin Chalut, a post-doctoral fellow at Pratt and the project’s lead author, tested the new technique on pig cartilage cells and mouse macrophages. The method allowed Chalut to analyze changes in the shape of the nucleus caused by salinity in the cell environment.
The research was supported by National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.
If you’d like to learn more, the team’s findings have been published in the May 29, 2008, edition of Biophysical Journal.
Source: Duke University Pratt School of Engineering News
Related Link: OpticsExpress.org
Technorati Tags: genomics; biophotonics; cell biology; oncology
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