part 3: The method may also have clinical applications. According to Professor Chiu:

The ability to manipulate optically submicrometer subcellular structures while minimizing photodamage has several practical applications. In particular, we are developing a droplet nanolab platform for single-organelle assays and chemical analysis, because many diseases are caused by organelle malfunction where a given cell can contain a heterogeneous population of healthy and defective organelles.

source:http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/category/molecular-cell-biology/

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he process by which particles are attracted to the laser beam is called ‘trapping’, and was first discovered by Arthur Ashikin of Bell Laboratories in 1970. It was originally developed as a technique for manipulating atoms - atomic physicists can use beams of focused light to cool atoms to extremely low temperatures - but optical tweezers can also applied to biological structures such as cell nuclei and chromosomes. Again, it was Ashkin and his colleagues who first demonstrated the use of optical tweezers on biological materials - used to trap individual tobacco mosaic virus particles and Escherichia coli bacteria. Since then, the technique has been used to investigate the mechanical properties of microtubules and to measure the forces generated by individual molecules of motor proteins.The use of optical tweezers in combination with a laser scalpel allows for even greater precision. For example, researchers at Eric Mazur’s photonics laboratory at Harvard University used used femtosecond pulses of light of a near-infrared wavelength to ablate AFD sensory neurons in the nematode worm Caenhorhabditis elegans (where a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second). Similarly, Adela Ben-Yakar and her colleagues at the University of Austin in Texas, used femtosecond pulses to sever individual motor axons in the nematode worm, in order to study nerve regeneration. Once the apparatus was set up, each procedure using the optical ‘nano-scissors’ took about ten minutes to perform.D-type motor neurons in the nematode worm before and after laser ablation with femtosecond pulses of near-infrared light Nanosurgery does, however, have its drawbacks. Many researchers engineer their organisms to fluoresce, so that the cells being investigated can be visualized easily. When a structure is trapped during nanosurgery, it is attracted to the centre of the laser beam, and because light intensity is greatest at the centre of the beam, photobleaching - the loss of fluorescence -

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