Malte Gather dan Seok-Hyun Yun dari Harvard Medical School dan Massachusetts General Hospital telah berjaya mendapatkan sel hidup tunggal untuk memancarkan sinar laser hijau, menurut sebuah makalah dalam Nature Photonics.
Mereka menggunakan kod genetik bagi versi mutan dari protein yang ditemui pada obor-obor bercahaya, yang dikenali sebagai GFP, untuk mencipta cahaya.
Mereka kemudian memasukkan gen yang diperlukan untuk menghasilkan Enhanced GFP (EGFP) ke dalam sel embrio berkembang daripada sel-sel ginjal (buah pinggang) manusia. Ini membuatkan ginjal mutan yang dihasilkan mampu menghasilkan cahaya sendiri.
Berita penuh dari Metro seperti di bawah, kerana saya pun tak faham sangat maksud keseluruhan.
Scientists create laser-producing living cell
The team behind the research - Malte Gather and Seok-Hyun Yun, of the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital respectively - managed to get a single living cell to emit green laser light, according to a paper in Nature Photonics.
They used a genetic code for a mutant version of a protein found in glowing jellyfish, known as GFP, to create the light.
They then inserted the genes necessary for producing the Enhanced GFP (eGFP) into cells grown from embryonic human kidney cells. This made the mutant kidney spawn capable of producing its own light.
The glowing part-human part-jellyfish part-glowstick kidney cells were then placed between two mirrors only 20 micrometers across, then bathed it in pulses of blue light of steadily increasing intensity.
While the blue light pulses were of low energy, the cells responded in the way that you'd expect half-jellyfish mutant human glowing kidney cells to do when pulsed with light - they fluoresced slightly.
But when the energy of the blue light passed a certain point, the cells' behaviour suddenly changed - they started emitting much brighter light of a single uniform green colour, which is directed rather than diffuse. In other words - it suddenly turns into a laser. And what's more it survived the process.
While practical applications for the living laser are still a way off - for those of you wandering, it'll be quite some time before you can genetically engineer yourself to shoot laser beams from your eyes - it is possible that it could find uses in the field of medicine.
But the researchers admit that ultimately, they didn't carry out their studies with a specific application in mind - Yun told Scientific American that 'it actually came from pure intellectual curiosity.'
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