s of near-infrared and visible light, in the micron range and below, enable imaging of structures on those size scales. Working with Brett Bouma and Guillermo Tearney at Wellman Labs in Massachusetts General Hospital, Iftimia will describe three recently developed optical imaging technologies:(1) a catheter-based "optical coherence tomography"system which can potentially detect inflammation in atherosclerotic plaques and a possible early sign of esophageal cancer; (2) low-coherence interferometry (LCI) that can improve physicians' ability to locate breast cysts during a biopsy procedure known as fine-needle aspiration; and (3) "spectral encoded confocal microscopy" (SECM) which exploits a telecommunications technique known as WDM to make possible a high-resolution microscope small enough to travel through narrow body regions such as the esophagus but powerful enough to obtain images with sub-cellular detail. (P10.003)

SINGLE-MOLECULE BIOPHYSICS
Biology is a fruitful arena for physicists hoping to study fundamental science or to apply known physics principles in new ways. One example of this is the use of nanotechnology in exploring and mimicking the behavior of cells. Cells are complex systems with outer membranes separating them from a wider environment and an inner membrane surrounding the cell nucleus. Daniel Branton (Harvard) and his colleagues have created an artificial membrane consisting of silicon-nitride substrate with a nanopore only nm in diameter. Since DNA molecules are slightly negative in charge, they can be gently pulled through the pore using a positive voltage differential. Furthermore, since the chemical base units which help to form the backbone of DNA cause the conductivity of the pore to change in a characteristic way, it is possible to map the bases as they go through. Although single-base resolution monitoring of bases is not yet available, this method shows great prospect of speeding up the genome sequencing process. (P
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Contact: David Harris
harris@aps.org
301-209-3238
American Physical Society
23-Jan-2003

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