Abstract
Laser guidance technique employs the optical forces generated from a focused Gaussian laser beam incident on a biological cell to trap and guide the cell along the laser propagation direction. The optical force, which determines the guidance speed, is dependent on the cellular characteristics of the cell being guided, such as size, shape, composition and morphology. Different cell populations or subpopulations can be detected without any fluorescent markers by measuring their guidance speeds. We found that cell guidance speeds were sensitive enough to monitor the subtle changes during the progression of mouse fibroblast cells from normal to cancerous phenotype. The results also demonstrated that this technique can effectively distinguish mouse mammary cancerous cells with different metastatic competence. Laser guidance technique can be used as a label-free cell detection method for basic cell biological investigation and cancer diagnosis.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1767-1772 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Biotechnology Letters |
Volume | 33 |
Issue number | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Cancer diagnostics
- Cell detection
- Laser guidance
- Optical force
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biotechnology
- Bioengineering
- Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology