At the end of July, a team at the NSU Physics Department’s Optics and Dynamics of Biological Systems Laboratory received a patent for a side scatter detector for cell cultures. This is a special device to remotely determine the cell concentration in a culture flask. Without removing the flask from the incubator and violating the integrity of the sample, scientists will be able to obtain the necessary data. This could be used, for example, in the process of testing new drugs.
Alexander Moskalensky, one of the cell detector developers and Laboratory Head, discussed their work,
When cells are placed in a fresh nutrient medium, after some time they begin to rapidly divide and go into a stationary state when the concentration stops changing. After this, the extinction phase may begin. For experiments, it is important to catch the stationary state when there are already a lot of cells but they are not dividing and have not died yet. Our detector was developed to address this issue but there are many potential applications. For example, in biotechnology it is important to monitor the concentration of producing microorganisms.
The equipment’s operation is based on measuring light scattered by a suspension of cells. This is not new, the innovation is the addition of measuring the dependence of the scattering intensity on the coordinate along the laser beam. This provides researchers with information on an additional parameter, the beam attenuation decrement. This makes it possible to estimate the concentration of cells in a culture.
A distinctive feature of the detector is its focus on an autonomous and wireless operation in a cell culture incubator. Unlike the usual portable microscopes, it does not require special devices for fixing and transmitting data because as cells grow in an ordinary vial, the detector receives information about their concentration.
Moskalensky emphasized,
The current version of the detector has only been tested on calibration particles that have the same and well-known parameters and it works for cell suspension cultures that are evenly distributed throughout the volume of the vial. Many cell cultures are much more complicated: they can attach to the bottom of the flask and grow on the surface, their optical model is not known, or the cells are different in their parameters and change during division. We plan to start testing the detector with a culture of T-lymphocytes this month, and, if necessary, we will refine it.
Early we talked about NSU graduate who participates in Floating University expedition.
