Super-Small Sensor Weighs Individual Cells, Casting Light on Growth Process
When it comes to your living cells size does indeed matter, and a team of MIT and Harvard scientists has figured out how to measure them with unprecedented accuracy. Using a sensor that is sensitive enough to weigh a single cell, the team managed to record the rate at which cells accrue mass over time, data that could help them establish the mechanisms by which single cells grow and how those processes fail when cells turn cancerous. Using a cell-mass sensor - a device that debuted in 2007 - the team measured four types of cells, two strains of bacteria, one strain of yeast and one sample of mammalian lymphoblasts. The cell-mass sensor works by allowing cells to flow one at a time through a tiny channel etched into a piece of silicon that vibrates inside a vacuum; as cells move through the chamber singularly, their masses change the vibration enough...