Oil droplets turn cells into tiny lasers

Indeed, back in 2011 Yun and Humar made an early version of living laser by introducing DNA into a cell that would make it luminesce, then placing the cell between two mirrors and blasting it with light pulses.

How about this for a bright idea: A team of researchers from Harvard Medical School has developed three different ways to turn individual cells into functioning lasers that emit light when they’re excited.

Biologists often choose lasers to effectively study cells.

Seok Hyun Yun, lead author of the report which appears in Nature Photonics, reckons an ultimate use of his work might be to deploy “intracellular microlasers as research tools, sensors, or perhaps as part of a drug treatment”. In one example, they injected oil into human cells-“almost any cell” will work, Humar tells Quartz-and filled the oil droplets with fluorescent dye. In both instances, pumping our bodies by using a heart beat of light provided a residing laser beam, like the light got rubbed on inside and of course the chamber shone.

“Our new cell laser technology will help us understand cellular processes and improve medical diagnosis and therapies”, Yun and Humar wrote in a piece for Phys.org. These too emitted lasers when they were hit with non-laser light.

The finding could make for significant improvements in cell imaging, used frequently in research on cancer and infectious diseases.

Today, fluorescent dyes are commonly used to tag living cells and emit light, but they produce a broad range of wavelengths that can make it challenging to differentiate one tagged cell from another.

Production of laser light within solid plastic fluorescent microbeads, which are readily taken up into cells, resulted in unique signature spectra based on the size and number of beads within a cell and the fluorescent dye used.

“Maybe the most interesting application is cell tagging, so you can see how the cells move”, Humar told Quartz. As New Scientist reported, a group at the University of St. Andrews in the UK has also worked with using macrophages to create intracellular lasers.