Massachusetts General Hospital investigators have induced subcutaneous fat cells in a piece of skin from a pig to emit laser light in response to energy delivered through an optical fiber (credit: Matjaž Humar and Seok Hyun Yun/Nature Photonics)
Imagine being able to label a trillion cells in the body to detect what’s going on in each individual cell.
That’s the eventual goal of a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study to allow individual cells to produce laser light. The wavelengths of light emitted by these intracellular microlasers differ based on factors such as the size, shape, and composition of each microlaser, allowing precise labeling of individual cells.