optical tweezers tagged posts

Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018.

Scientists have now used supercomputers to make optica...

Artificial cells (false-color image) in a range of structures. Credit: Imperial College London

Researchers have used lasers to connect, arrange and merge artificial cells, paving the way for networks of artificial cells that act like tissues. The team say that by altering artificial cell membranes they can now get the cells to stick together like ‘stickle bricks’ – allowing them to be arranged into whole new structures.

Biological cells can perform complex functions, but are difficult to controllably engineer. Artificial cells, however, can in principle be made to order...

A close-up of part of the fiber optical tweezers developed by a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The two fibers seen here project intersecting beams of laser light to create a three-dimensional optical trap that can hold and move individual cells. Credit: Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has demonstrated how a device that uses beams of light to grip and manipulate tiny objects, including individual cells, can be miniaturized, opening the door to creating portable devices small enough to be inserted into the bloodstream to trap individual cancer cells and diagnose cancer in its earliest stages.

The technique, known as optical tweezers, uses optical beams of laser light to create an attractive force fi...