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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."

1 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. 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.