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Holographic Laser Tweezers To Manipulate Cells

Posted by timothy on from the to-fit-on-the-head-of-mutant-minnows dept.

SteamyMobile writes "How do you move things as small as single cells? Using tweezers, of course, but not just any tweezers. These tweezers must be holographic laser tweezers, developed at the University of Glasgow and Oxford University. These tweezers use a hologram to structure a light source in such a way as to exert just enough gentle pressure to move a cell. First, they use light to move water, and now this. I can think of some applications, too."

6 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. The paper. by jabberjaw · · Score: 4, Informative

    The paper can be found at Optics Express. One can also find video of the tweezers in action.

  2. And the website. by jabberjaw · · Score: 4, Informative

    Further digging led me to theUniversity of Glasgow's Optics Groupd where there is a great deal of information on their project page about optical tweezers. As an aside, I don't suppose anyone has the time to elaborate on the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm?

  3. Optical tweezers arrived in the 80's by juggledean · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What's new in todays article is the holographic part, to be able to have multiple tweezers. The classical optical tweezer was/is done with a lens. It turns out that an intense tightly focused light beam can hold a small bit of dielectric, a small plastic bead or a bacteria or other cell.


    The neater optical tweezer work (IMHO) has been done by attaching a protein molecule to a plastic bead and measure the force generated when that molecule interacts with another molecule. One can measure the force that a single myosin molecule exerts as it pulls on an actin chain and the size of the step that it makes or the force that is exerted on a DNA molecule as it is pulled through the duplicating process.

    1. Re:Optical tweezers arrived in the 80's by the+gnat · · Score: 2, Informative

      Other experiments have included using the tweezers to pull a protein or DNA molecule apart and observe how it folds back up. This can be applied to study the kinetics of protein folding, and also elucidate the mechanisms of protein machinery such as chromatin organizing complexes.

      There's actually quite a bit of work being done with single-molecule studies, and laser tweezers are just one of several methods. One paper I read involved watching a single DNA helicase unwind a fluorescently labelled DNA molecule: the researchers watched the end of the DNA helix fray open as the helicase moved down it.

      The coolest of these experiments in my opinion, though, is this one and a number of followups. These are probably among the most awesome accomplishments in biology in the past decade.

  4. I can see the cheap magazine ads now... by JavaRob · · Score: 2, Funny

    NEW Laser Tweezers! Remove unwanted, excessive facial hair... permanently! Recommended by a number* of well-known physicians!

    (* number may be any integer)

    Oh, wait -- manipulating _cells_.
    Yeah, I guess that's also useful to humanity... but not as exciting.

  5. Not as cool as it gets by Wolf1316 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Though I didn't RTFA, I can tell you there seem to be cooler laser-tweezer applications out there. For instance, right now my sister is working at the Stanford Block Lab, where they are manipulating and studying single molecules with laser traps.

    It's really cool to watch, and manipulating things like RNA Polymerase on a single-molecular scale just seems like the way bio research should be done.