The Laboratory conducts research on the physical properties of the biological activity of the systems under study. It focuses on cellular adaptation to external forces, the characterization of mechanical properties of the studied cells and, more recently, the identification of the biological activity through the detection of fluctuations in systems where thermal fluctuations predominate. To address these problems of physical and biological interest, our research team has built and developed ad-hoc experimental techniques such as optical tweezers and the detection of fluctuations through laser interferometry, complemented by Fourier analysis, correlations and wavelets for characterizing complex systems.
RESEARCH LINE
Biophysics
Complex systems
Advanced instruments
EQUIPMENT
The laboratory is equipped with a wide variety of instrumentation for building and/or modifying experimental setups, including digital cameras, sources of coherent and incoherent light, highly sensitive and fast response photodetectors, data acquisition systems and digital control of instruments. Some of the developed or modified equipment available in the laboratory are:
Olympus IX-81 inverted microscope equipped with clear field, dark field, phase contrast and differential interferential contrast techniques with 4x, 10x, 20x, 40x, 60x and 100x immersion lenses, as well as three-channel fluorescence.
Optical tweezers designed and optimized to detect fluctuations in the range of 0.1 to 10kHz, with a data acquisition rate of up to 1MHz (limited by the QDP position sensor response of 100kHz). The instrument uses a temperature and current stabilized 975nm infrared laser. The optical tweezer is built on a Thorlabs optical and opto-mechanical base that allows for taking clear field microscopic images in transmission and features a two-channel fluorescence microscopy.