Using light to understand what a cell feels

Biophotonics deals with the interaction between light and biological matter. The research projects of my lab have the common theme of harnessing laser light and its interaction with cells or particles for applications in the life sciences. One such application is microrheology of biological substrates. Rheology is the study of how material responds to stress and strain. Rheological studies are typically performed in bulk, whereas laser light, in particular optical tweezers, allow us to perform mechanical measurements on the microscale, on the scale of single cells and can give us a sense of what cells ‘feel’ in their microscopic surroundings. This is typically done in 2D but we have extended measurements into 3D (with Prof Paul Dalgarno).
Microrheology may generate important data on how cells respond to, or shape their environment, and I will discuss the application in 3D cancer cell cultures which was conducted as part of a collaborative UKRI funded project nu-sense.