Credit: Jennifer Lauren Lee/NIST
An empty petri dish with two optical fibers, illustrating one version of the researchers’ experiment. The left-hand fiber (usually shining infrared light, but depicted here as visible red light) is a temperature sensor. The top fiber shines green, red or blue light into the petri dish to adjust the signal that the temperature sensor measures.
Someday, doctors would like to grow limbs and other body tissue for soldiers who have lost arms in battle, children who need a new heart or liver, and many other people with critical needs. Today, medical professionals can graft cells from a patient, deposit them onto a tissue scaffold, and insert the scaffold into the body to encourage the growth of bone, cartilage and other specialized tissue. But researchers are still working toward building complex organs that can be implanted into patients.
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are supporting this field of research by developing a promising new kind of light-based sensor to study tissue growth in the lab.
The NIST team’s proof-of-concept work, published today in Sensors and Actuators B, demonstrates a small sensor that uses a light-based signal to measure pH, the measurement unit for acidity, an important property in cell-growth studies. The same basic design could be used to measure other qualities such as the presence of calcium, cell growth factor and certain antibodies.
Unlike conventional sensors, this measurement method could be used to monitor the environment in a cell culture long-term — for weeks at a time — without having to disturb the cells regularly to calibrate the sensing instruments. Watching properties of the tissue in real time as they slowly change, over days or weeks, could greatly benefit tissue engineering studies ..
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