Title:Experimental Interactions of Femtosecond Laser with Cells
Speaker:Prof. Kam Tai CHAN
Time:Jun.30.2010,14:30PM
Venue: Room A101 at WNLO
Abstract:
Laser technologies have advanced rapidly in recent years and in fact have been applied in many applications such as eye surgery and optical coherence tomography in medicine. In particular, femtosecond (fs) lasers can also be used to study the fundamental processes within live cells. Femtosecond lasers possess unique features that are not achievable with other lasers. It induces minimal, if any, damage to the cell under study because it can generate much less linear absorption and heat than CW lasers. Besides, due to their high peak power, fs lasers can generate multi-photon ionization within cells and thus can perforate the cell membrane to enable transfection and cell fusion to take place, apparently without harming the cells. In this talk, I shall report our studies in transfection and cell fusion and the dynamics during cellular apoptosis introduced by fs beams. We propose probable mechanisms for the generation of reactive oxygen species, nuclear tubules and free calcium at the cellular level triggered by the fs beam.
