The Inside Scoop

Fundamentally, biomedical science is about finding out how our bodies, organs, and cells work. Often, the best way to do that is to get under the skin, and see what’s happening inside. But getting inside a tiny, fragile cell isn’t straightforward. Until recently, most information about cells came from looking at them from the outside, but that’s a bit like trying to understand how a TV works by just watching it. Now scientists have designed a sensor that can slip inside cells and feed back information about the internal goings on, like a spy camera hidden in a private room. The chip, shown here (gold rectangle, centre) nestled inside a human cancer cell, is made of silicon and detects pressure changes without disturbing the cell’s normal function. Could similar chips detecting other variables like temperature or chemical concentrations offer a brand new view on cell biology?

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• José A. Plaza
• Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona, Spain
• Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature nanotechnology Copyright 2013
• Published in Nature Nanotechnology 8, 517–521