Nano fiber feels forces and hears sounds made by cells

[SciTechPress]

Nano fiber feels forces and hears sounds made by cells:

mindblowingscience:

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a miniature device that’s sensitive enough to feel the forces generated by swimming bacteria and hear the beating of heart muscle cells.

The device is a nano-sized optical fiber that’s about 100 times thinner than a human hair. It can detect forces down to 160 femtonewtons—about ten trillion times smaller than a newton—when placed in a solution containing live Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which are swimming bacteria found in the gut. In cultures of beating heart muscle cells from mice, the nano fiber can detect sounds down to -30 decibels—a level that’s one thousand times below the limit of the human ear.

“This work could open up new doors to track small interactions and changes that couldn’t be tracked before,” said nanoengineering professor Donald Sirbuly at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, who led the study.

Some applications, he envisions, include detecting the presence and activity of a single bacterium; monitoring bonds forming and breaking; sensing changes in a cell’s mechanical behavior that might signal it becoming cancerous or being attacked by a virus; or a mini stethoscope to monitor cellular acoustics in vivo.

The work is published in Nature Photonics on May 15.

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via ScitechPress.org