NANO-SIZED laser beams have been used to distinguish a single cancerous cell from a normal one. Doctors could one day use the technique to diagnose cancer during an office visit.
Long before symptoms of disease appear, cancerous human cells show telltale changes in their internal structure. In particular, the cellular power plants known as mitochondria rearrange themselves, spreading out within the cell rather than clustering near its nucleus. Standard chemical staining tests that look for such changes can take days to perform and are sometimes inconclusive.
Now, Paul Gourley of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and colleagues have…
