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Femtosecond Lasers for Nanosurgery
Roland Piquepaille writes "In "Lasers operate inside single cells," Nature writes that nanosurgery can be achieved by vaporizing some components of living cells without killing the cells themselves. "With pulses of intense laser light a millionth of a billionth of a second long, US researchers are vaporizing tiny structures inside living cells without killing them. The technique could help probe how cells work, and perform super-precise surgery." This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues. This summary contains more details and references about the process and these microexplosions. Please note that it's a very different technique from the one described six months ago in a previous Slashdot reference, Surgery with Femtosecond Lasers."
OH MY! MICRO explotions! Are they starting a micro-war?
I never thought that would happend.
In the future, when there are nanoprobes of all kinds, there will probably be lots of rogue nanoprobes infesting the cells. Maybe they can be zapped out with these lasers.
It has been said that evolution of cells must have been impossible, because each part of the cell is necessary for the cell to live, and thus they must have all evolved at the same time, which is highly unlikely. Perhaps this is a way to test that theory?
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
nature does not write articles - articles are submitted for peer review from the original authors - nature is a publisher of others' work, not an original contributor to scientific journalism - same w/ science, prl, apl, etc.
something like scientific american or pop. sci. 'dumbs down' the material for layman, but that usually comes later after the peer review journals have their fix.
but i'm just being pedantic.
to email me: take my
sounds like a good means for altering genes in the future. if they keep working at it, ya never know. i could be way off though
Nanosurgery vaporizes cellular components leaving rest intact.
06 October 2003
JOHN WHITFIELD
Other ways of manipulating cells' insides leave the disabled structure behind
SPL
With pulses of intense laser light a millionth of a billionth of a second long, US researchers are vaporizing tiny structures inside living cells without killing them. The technique could help probe how cells work,
and perform super-precise surgery.
Physicist Eric Mazur of Harvard University and
his colleagues have severed parts of cells' internal protein skeleton, have destroyed a single mitochondrion, the cell's powerhouse, leaving its hundreds of neighbours untouched, and have
cut a nerve cell's connection without killing it. They christen their technique laser nanosurgery.
"It's a microscopic James Bond type of scenario," says team member Donald Ingber, a cell biologist at Harvard. "It generates the heat of the Sun, but only for quintillionths of a second, and in a very small space."
The team developed the technique to create tiny spots in glass for applications such as data storage. Mazur will unveil their results in cells at the Frontiers in Optics conference in Tucson, Arizona, this week.
Focal point
The laser works inside the cell without damaging the surface. The light is focused extremely tightly, using a microscope, into a space a few hundred millionths of a millimetre across.
A tiny amount of energy obliterates the tissue at the focal point, so the surrounding cell is not cooked. I just took the dirtiest shit ever. When I wiped, it looked like worn out brown magic marker. The energy is about equal to the impact of a flying gnat, says Mazur: "A cell can easily take that."
It is a fine tool for probing the structure of cells.
Paul WisemanMcGill University
McGill University
Existing ways of manipulating cells' insides, using light or magnetism, for example, leave the targeted structure behind and are less precise. "I'm quite excited by it," says cell biophysicist Paul Wiseman of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
"It's a fine tool for probing the structure of cells," Wiseman says. Severing cells' skeletal and muscle-like filaments will uncover how they move and organize their contents during processes such as division, he hopes.
Life inside
Cellular surgery can also manipulate whole animals. In the past few months, the Harvard team has begun work with the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans. By blasting through a single nerve, the team removed the animal's sense of smell.
Lasers are already used in eye surgery: in the future, laser scalpels could cut inside tissues without opening up the patient, says Mazur.
Or they could pick off cancerous cells, suggests Wiseman. At present, tumours are only found when they are too big for such treatment, but researchers are striving to improve detection. "If one could detect the rare cell in a mass of cells, one could intervene with targeted destruction," he says.
The reason we need lasers for nanotechnology is because lasers are precise down to the last millimeter. This makes working on the brain a lot safer and less error-prone that the way they used to do it, with rulers and scissors.
With this new technology, I am sure insurance costs will go down.
Hmmmmm. These techniques, combined with multispectral analysis of tissues in real time could be just the ticket for surgical resection of certain cancers(meningiomas etc....). The multispectral analysis could be combined with a robotic laser that could automatically lase the "transformed" tissues, thus selectively killing cancerous cells. Cool.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I'm curious as to the power draw and commercial applicability, at least in the neart term. That is, how much power would a tool like this draw, how many shots would be required to destroy, say, a gleoblastoma in a patient's brain, and exactly how precise is it? That is, how deep can it be tuned, and does it have difficulty say, affecting marrow through the bone? Nonetheless, very interesting preliminary work!
I don't think femtosecond is a word.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They would get a lot more done if they left the laser on longer.
How often do you see something like "In "?
Karma: NaN
For the less mathmatically-inclined, how long is that in football fields?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Now we can just destroy the chloroplasts in plants, allowing the cells to still live but be unable to harness the electrical energy from the sun?
"You see, I was born with too much smarts, so they had to operate to relieve the pressure.."
*drool*
goodness. every now and then we acquire a technology so advanced that one may first wonder "how the hell can we implement that usefully?"
and then i think Star Trek a second... imagine miniaturized lasers like these in a handheld device that performs automatically according to a doctor's settings.
hehe.
If you can affect something inside a single cell accurately, couldn't this same technology be used to alter ink colors for super high-resolution laser printing? Like 10,000 DPI non-interpreted?
stuff |
I doubt they'll ever find weapons of micro destruction.
Nanosurgery with lasers...wow...everything just keeps getting smaller.
Does anyone remember the Nanobots in the Red Dwarf series?
If not, they were tiny (VERY tiny) machines that you could re-arrange atoms, so in essence they could turn dust into gold. (provided a very extra atoms were used). Just imagine if these Nanobots ever become a reality, and their implications on surgery.
Just think...this tiny robot could not only be used for surgery, but if you gave it some kind of animal (such as a sheep), it could make new bodily organs for humans!
This was developed by Eric Mazur of Harvard University and his colleagues.
The MASER was the predecessor of the LASER. Though most don't know this, LASER is an acronym standing for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." The difference is that MASERs amplify Microwaves instead of light.
Isn't it convenient that the lead scientist on this is named just happened to be named "Mazur?" . . . Waitaminut, where'd that black helicopter come from?
(You can get a little info about MASERs and LASERs here)
blog
Nobel Prize 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Ahmed Zewail of California Institute of Technology, US, for probing chemical reactions with femtosecond (10-15 second) laser pulses. The studies have helped understand how catalysts and biological processes function and how molecular electronics should be designed.
In the late 1980s, Zewail began imaging molecules, as they react, by bombarding them with laser pulses at intervals of tens of femtoseconds. The technique became known as femtosecond spectroscopy, or femtochemistry. Chemical reactions occur on a timescale of typically 10-100 femtoseconds so the imaging technique allows chemists to watch bonds within molecules break and reform.
The technique now allows chemists to observe the unstable, short-lived species formed as intermediates during reactions.
In femtosecond spectroscopy the original substances are mixed as beams of molecules in a vacuum chamber. An ultrafast laser then injects two pulses, a 'pump' pulse and then a 'probe' pulse. The first, high-energy pulse starts the reactions and the second, weaker pulse shows what is happening. Altering the time interval between the two pulses allows chemists to see how the molecular structure changes during the reaction. Each step in the reaction gives a characteristic spectrum that serves as a fingerprint. Comparing this with theoretical calculations gives the structure of the intermediate products.
this new division in time is also known as the point time stops for chemistry because chemical bonds can now be seen changing from one substance to another in real time, now we can see not only the bonds before and after they change but the actual process in-between which was something we could not do before, think of it as getting a film camera over a still and how much more you can see/understand about a process in each 25th of a seconds frame than an image every 1min, this discovery is very significant, more than a lot of people realise.
AS
Increase the size of my manhood and split her with my horse cock j6546@adelphia.net ????
I mean, really...
Blar.
I'm glad to see real research going on, as opposed to research that doesn't really benefit anybody. (Thankfully, no USA funds were harmed in the making of that report.)
millionth of a billionth of a second ??
That sounds, like, soooo way totally not a technical term
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
...to destroy CowboyNeal's penis.
Perhaps this is a way to test that theory?
Highly, highly doubtful. Just because cell components were once independent of eachother doesn't mean that they have not become dependent on eachother. This is the way ecosystems work; you get a whole lot of different things that evolved at completely different times (plants, insects, lizards, mammals, etc.), and yet they create a balance with each other that goes totally out of whack if you screw with part of it.
To use a much worse, but more slashdot-friendly, analogy: Imagine, however, that we simply wiped Windows from all the personal computers on the plant, without replacing it with anything. Most computers would cease to function entirely. From this, could we conclude that Windows and the personal computer must have been created at the same moment?
P.S. Spare us the trolls about what a good idea this would be
--Chag
I work with femto-second lasers. I have used them in living cells for a variety of applications. Two of which involve destroying structures inside of living cells. Of course, these structures are placed into the cells by us (injection, knock-in, electroporation, etc). It's not an extremely new technique, it's just being used in a slightly new way. Some of the similar techniques are known as uncaging, FRAP, and more.
/., semiconductor nanocrystals are starting to pop up in similar research. They are quite useful, if still hard to work with (they don't behave like most biological molecules). I got interested in quantum dots about a year ago, and have done a bit of work with them, but would like to do some more (when I find the time).
Personally, I rarely find anything that groundbreakingly new in Nature. Well, that's not exactly true. There is plenty of new data, and new applications and/or refinements of old techniques. There generally aren't wholly original techniques or completely new instruments discussed in that journal. My personal preference for that sort of thing are some physics journals.
One other thing, that may be of interest to
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
The MASER was the predecessor of the LASER.
The LASER was the predecessor of the MASER.
You are thinking of the KASER, which was the predecessor to the LASER. Of course the JASER was the predecessor to the KASER.
Reminds me of the Far Side with the two doctors poking the patient's brain during surgery to watch his leg jump. "ooo, now you try. Poke right here."
Please help metamoderate.
I used to work on a biomedical project at the Univ. of Michigan involving high-speed lasers (usually femtosecond duration) as a tool to replace the larger ablative lasers used in standard refractive surgery (LASIK). The femtosecond lasers could be focused intrastromally, such that the material ablated was directly inside the cornea. Due to the relaxation of some stromal pressure, the cornea itself would reshape to a softer lens, without the huge amount of ablation required by current lasers. http://www.intralase.com/home.html
Won't they have to start calling it "femtosurgery" now?
Maybe handy for tumors...
Intersecting beams (more then several-one beam would have to be weak enough not to do damage to healthy cells), an accurate tracking mechanisim, kill off the cells growing ability.
I've always thought the borg solution or a hollowed out aids virus as a second more customizable immune system held the most promise.
In case anyone is interested, Mazur is a hardcore Mac zealot. I am quite serious about this. That is all.
...must mean that Slashdot doesn't like it when people point out duplicate stories. The actually went out of their way to make sure everyone knows that this isn't a dupe. Now THAT's funny.
Un-news
Finally they can examine cells without killing them. This is a great victory for cell rights activists everywhere. If you've ever heard the screams of poor innocent cells, like from that bottle of maddog the other night, you'll be able to truly appreciate the suffering these misunderstood creatures have had to endure.
I think that is mega-cool. I just hope it doesn't kilo the patient.
What I want to know is, can I mount one of these on a sharks head?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Bad news, Mr. Jones: I'm afraid the mitochondria in the 35th from the last cell at the end of the 14th cappilary on the backside of your left pinky have to come out.
That'll be $1500.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
By targeted destruction of "fecal" buildup in cells, this can be used in single-celled and small multi-celled organisms to test various theories of aging (how much said buildup contributes to cell and organism death).
Femtosecond Microlasers Pikofor Nanosurgery (not to be confused with the article we had on MilliFemtominute Attolasers for Decisurgery last Centimonth).
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
Did you mean to have a period at the end of your username ? I cannot see your journals or your details because of that (I think)