Advanced photonics: Optical trapping techniques in bioanalysis

Knowledge about life processes has expanded dramatically during the 20th century and produced the modern disciplines of genomics and proteomics. However, there remains the great challenge of discovering the integration and regulation of living components in time and space within the cell. As we move into the postgenomic period, the complementarity between genomics and proteomics will become apparent, and the connections between them will be exploited, although genomics, proteomics, or their simple combination will not provide the data necessary to interconnect molecular events in living cells in time and space. The cells in a group are different entities, and differences arise even among cells grown in homogeneous conditions considered to have identical genetic information. These cells respond differently to perturbations. The question is why and how these differences arise. They might be caused by unequal distributions of biomolecules in cells, mutations, interactions between cells, fluctuations of environmental elements that affect the cell, etc. To understand the principle underlying the differences, keeping in mind the possibilities mentioned above, a system is necessary that would allow for the continuous observation of specific cells under fully controlled circumstances such as interactions between cells.