In the Balance

A structure used in the building of canyon-spanning bridges has been transformed by a collaboration of physicists and biologists into a tiny set of scales that can weigh individual cells. These scales are incredibly precise, detecting weight changes that are one trillion times smaller than a rivet. A cell is balanced near the edge of a long beam, called a cantilever, which is anchored at the opposite end. This device allows the moment-to-moment changes in a cell’s weight to be tracked in minute detail. It could help understand how a cell’s internal physiology changes during diseases such as cancer or in response to drug treatments. To test it out, the team weighed a cell before and after infection with a virus. At first, the scales detected cell growth and a gradual increase in mass. But after infection this growth was halted as the virus began to hijack the cell’s resources.

Written by Deborah Oakley

Deborah Oakley

Writer

Deborah is researching healthy cognitive ageing at the University of Cambridge. She previously worked as a science communicator in London, working closely with the BPoD team.

• Image from work by David Martínez-Martín & Gotthold Fläschner, and colleagues. The University of Basel and ETH Zürich
• Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, and Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, Basel, Switzerland.
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, October 2017