Nanoknives To Be Used to Cut Cells

Roland Piquepaille writes "American researchers have built a carbon nanotube knife. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), this nanoknife will be used to cut and study cells. With this new tool, scientists and biologists will be able to make 3D images of cells and tissues for electron tomography, which requires samples less than 300 nanometers thick. And as cells are usually stored in wax for dissection, the researchers plan to test their nanoknives on a block of wax later this year. But read more for additional references and a picture of this nanoknife."

Comments

Re:How hard is it to wrap a carbon nanotube?

[imsabbel]

Friction on atomar level isnt what you are used to.

Trying to tie or wrap those nanotypes would be more than futile.

Size scales

[SiliconEntity]

It's easy to get sizes mixed up. Nanometers, microns, angstroms, they all sound about the same.

300 nanometers is a third of a micron. Cells vary greatly in size and shape but a ballpark figure for human cells is 20 microns. So we're not talking about something that is all that "sharp" compared to the size of the object it aims to cut.

Re:Size scales

[wall0159]

The 300 nm refers to the typical desired thickness of a slice of tissue. TFA states that typical glass knives need to be relatively thick to be strong enough, causing the sample to bend as it is being sliced.

Conversely, the nano knife consists of a single carbon nanotube, stretched between two brackets. This is not a 'blade' in the traditional sense of the word, but is more akin to a cheese knife that is a wire under tension.

Wikipedia states that the diameter of a carbon nanotube is in the order of a few nanometers.

Re:Not enough 'nano' prefixes

[cyfer2000]

Depends on the size of the molecule you are referring, "molecular scale" can be ranged Angstrom to hundreds of micron.

The basics

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea here is that the carbon nanotube may be able to replace the diamond or glass knives typically used for cutting biological specimens which have been embedded in a cured plastic resin. The knife and the sample to be cut are mounted on an ultramicrotome and then sectioned at 50-90nm increments.

TFA states that the carbon nanoknife has yet to be tested cutting anything, so it's unclear to me the extent to which it could be used to replace a diamond knife. Also, a diamond or glass knife edge can be millimeters long, whereas this nanotube thread looks much shorter.

tag as "pigpile"

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, tag as "pigpile" to warn Slashdotters not to click on Roland Piquepaille's ads.