Using a high-tech imaging method, a team of biomedical engineers at the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis was able to seeearly-developing cancer cells deeper in tissue than ever before with the help of a novel protein from a bacterium.
Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering; Junjie Yao, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Wang’s lab, and a team of engineers found that by genetically modifying glioblastoma cancer cells to express BphP1 protein, derived from the rhodopsuedomonas palustris bacterium, they could clearly see tens to hundreds of live cancer cells as deep as 1 centimeter in tissue using photoacoustic tomography.
The work, published Nov. 9 in advanced online publication of Nature Methods, is the first to combine deep-penetration, high-resolution photoacoustic tomography with a reversibly switchable, non-fluorescent bacterial phytochrome.
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