UFO Sighting

Finding out the molecular mechanisms that make some cancer cells particularly aggressive is essential for developing new anti-cancer drugs. But identifying and isolating such aggressors from a population of cells is not easy. That’s why scientists have developed an automated system for detecting and labelling misbehaving cells within a crowd. The system utilises a microscopy technique called ultrawide field-of-view optics (UFO), which allows a huge number of cells to be viewed at once, and image processing software that automatically monitors each cell’s behaviour. If errant activity is detected, such as rapid growth, the software automatically positions the microscope’s lasers toward the individual cells to label them – all cells having been pre-treated with a light-activated dye for this purpose. Labelling allows the cells to be readily isolated for further study. A demonstration of this laser labelling system is shown in the image above where particular cells have been alien-ated. Get it?!

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Pin-Rui Su from work by Li You, Pin-Rui Su and Max Betjes, and colleagues
• Department of Molecular Genetics, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
• Image in the Public Domain
• Research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, March 2022