Shaping cells with light
An international team led by Erwin Frey, physicist at LMU and holder of the Chair in Statistical and Biological Physics, and Nikta Fakhri, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has elucidated for the first time the mechanisms by which cells dynamically change shape in response to environmental influences, and has succeeded in controlling this process from the outside using light stimuli. Dynamic cell deformation is an essential feature of living cells and is involved in various fundamental processes such as cell division. The authors believe that these results could have “wide-ranging implications for the development of synthetic cells and biomimetic materials and open up new opportunities for synthetic biology and cell-based technologies.”
For further information:
- Biophysics: shaping cells with light – Press release from LMU
- Scientific article: Jinghui Liu, Tom Burkart, Alexander Ziepke, John Reinhard, Yu-Chen Chao, Tzer Han Tan, S. Zachary Swartz, Erwin Frey, Nikta Fakhri: Light-induced cortical excitability reveals programmable shape dynamics in starfish oocytes. Nature Physics 2025