In recent years, the advantages of using small invertebrate animals as model systems for human disease have become increasingly apparent and have resulted in three Nobel Prizes in medicine or chemistry during the last six years for studies conducted on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). The availability of a wide array of speciesspecific genetic techniques, along with the transpa...

The Golgi complex has a central role in the secretory pathway of all higher organisms. To explain the synthesis of its unique stacked structure in mammalian cells, two major models have been proposed. One suggests that it is synthesized de novo from the endoplasmic reticulum. The second model postulates a pre-existing Golgi template that serves as a scaffold for its biogenesis. To test these hy...

Fs laser nanosurgery is characterized by the formation of low-density plasma followed by chemical effects of the free electrons (bond breaking), thermal effects, and compressive and tensile thermoelastic stress waves that produce transient cavitation bubbles. Dissection using oscillator pulse trains at >> 1 MHz is usually performed at energies well below the bubble formation threshold and thus ...

The atomic force microscope (AFM) was used to directly image hippocampal neurons and glia. Using chemically fixed and living cells it was possible to reconstruct three-dimensional cell structure and detect sub-cellular features such as the nucleus, mitochondria and filaments. By repeatedly scanning a single living cell we observed the movement of filaments beneath the cell membrane. Furthermore...

Nanoparticle mediated laser induced breakdown can be used for synthesis, cell nanosurgery and spectroscopy. To investigate the photo-thermal conversion of gold nanoparticles during pulsed irradiation, electron-phonon two temperature model was established in this study. The impact energy density pulse width on thermal morphology change nanorods were investigated compared with experimental observ...