Tiny little lasers

Injectins cells with a luminiscent dye and droplets of oil turns the cells in tiny little lasers that can be used in diagnosting diseases and like a label for a cell.

An optical fibre is shown activating tiny lasers created within pig skin cells.

Scientists turned cells in lasers at injecting oil or fat mixed with a luminiscent dye an activating it with short pulses of light.

This finding could be used for diagnosis and for medical treatment and was divised by Seon Hyuk Yun and Matjaz Humar, optical physicists from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachussets and uses oil droplets or fat to reflect and amplify the light to generate a laser.

The lipid droplet (orange) within a fat cell can be used as a natural laser.

Luminiscent probes, which includes proteins and fluorescent dyes, had a broad emission spectra around 30 to 100 nanometers. With this broad bands its limits the number of probes, because its difficult to distinguish the sources of light.

This could change because the spectra from this source of light is narrow - around 500 to 800 nanometers, making it easy to label cells. Also, Yan and Humar reported that can vary the wavelenght and can tag individual cells using polystirene beads with different diameter rather than inject oil or fat. And also reports that in theory usind differents dyes with different spectral properties and different polystirene bends they can tag every cell in the human body.