OPTICAL NEAR-FIELD CELL MEMBRANE NANO-MOVEMENT BIOSENSING

Live biosamples like cells, for example cardiac cells, have natural movement. Not only they move horizontally, they grow and “walk”. But also they have tiny vertical movement. Their membrane vibrate up and down. These movement can be big, for example for the case of cardiac cells. But also these movements can be really tiny, few nanometer. These membrane activity, a sort of very tiny vibration, is possible to be detected only with recent nano-sensing techniques, as near-field microscopy. These technique is purely optical so the cell is not disturbed. It is impossible to detect these nano-movement with an optical microscope or with other classical methods.
It is possible to show that with near field optics, we can obtain vertical sensitivity better than 1 nanometer. The membrane vibration of sample cells was unknown, however in previous research we showed that there are fast vertical nano-sized movements. What is the meaning of this movements. Do they convey information ? If so what is this information ? It is a kind of “language” that the Cell is speaking to his neighbour ? If so can we also “speak” to a cell. We plan to use a Near-field optical setup to investigate in this phenomena on live cells.
We plan not only to detect these movement, but also we plan to stimulate the cell with nano-scaled vibrations and try to detect the cell reaction.
Maria Fernanda Avila Ortega is currently working on this project.




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