Usually when you think of optics and light, you think of looking at something. In this lab we indeed use optical tools to “look at” the inner working of living things, but we also do more with optics.

One aim of our research is to develop techniques that allow us to perturb and manipulate the biological systems we are watching, and it turns out that light is an ideal tool for this task as well.

We use very short laser pulses (measured in millionths of billionths of a second in duration) to make cuts with a width of less than one-tenth the diameter of a single cell. These cuts can even be completely inside a tissue (i.e. we can cut inside without distrubing the surface).

We use this ultra-precise laser scalpel to locally damage the sample we are studying, and then we observe the reaction. For example, we have found that by making a small cut to a single blood vessel in the brain of a rodent we can cause that blood vessel to clot (just like your hand clots after a small cut). We use these single-vessel blood clots to help understand and develop treatments for stroke.

Image of a blood vessel that was ruptured with light.