Two-photon induced collagen cross-linking in bioartificial cardiac tissue.

Cardiac tissue engineering is a promising strategy for regenerative therapies to overcome the shortage of donor organs for transplantation. Besides contractile function, the stiffness of tissue engineered constructs is crucial to generate transplantable tissue surrogates with sufficient mechanical stability to withstand the high pressure present in the heart. Although several collagen cross-linking techniques have proven to be efficient in stabilizing biomaterials, they cannot be applied to cardiac tissue engineering, as cell death occurs in the treated area.

Femtosecond laser-induced fusion of nonadherent cells and two-cell porcine embryos.

Cell fusion is a fundamental biological process that can be artificially induced by different methods. Although femtosecond (fs) lasers have been successfully employed for cell fusion over the past few years, the underlying mechanisms are still unknown. In our experimental study, we investigated the correlation between fs laser-induced cell fusion and membrane perforation, and the influence of laser parameters on the fusion efficiency of nonadherent HL-60 cells.

Superresolved femtosecond laser nanosurgery of cells.

We report on femtosecond nanosurgery of fluorescently labeled structures in cells with a spatially superresolved laser beam. The focal spot width is reduced using phase filtering applied with a programmable phase modulator. A comprehensive statistical analysis of the resulting cuts demonstrates an achievable average resolution enhancement of 30 %.

Combined multiphoton imaging and automated functional enucleation of porcine oocytes using femtosecond laser pulses.

Since the birth of "Dolly" as the first mammal cloned from a differentiated cell, somatic cell cloning has been successful in several mammalian species, albeit at low success rates. The highly invasive mechanical enucleation step of a cloning protocol requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and considerable micromanipulation skill. We present a novel noninvasive method for combined oocyte imaging and automated functional enucleation using femtosecond (fs) laser pulses.

Repetition rate dependency of reactive oxygen species formation during femtosecond laser-based cell surgery.

Femtosecond (fs) laser-based cell surgery is typically done in two different regimes, at kHz or MHz repetition rate. Formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is an often predicted effect due to illumination with short laser pulses in biological tissue. We present our study on ROS formation in single cells in response to irradiation with fs laser pulses depending on the repetition rate while focusing into the cell nucleus.