Published in Horizon, 10 Sep 2015
Scientists have been able to engineer human cells to emit a unique laser ‘barcode’, a breakthrough that could help to track the spread of cancer cells throughout the body.
The short history of cell lasers goes back to 2011, when physicists Dr Malte Gather and Professor Seok-Hyun Yun of Harvard Medical School, US, engineered human cells to make them express a fluorescent protein, and placed them between a pair of tiny mirrors.
When the scientists pumped the cells with a blue laser, the cells re-emitted the light as green. This light reflected back and forth between the mirrors to form a coherent beam, just like a normal laser. […]
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