Gene therapy of the human retina levels of light. What follows often is the death of cone cells, responsible for color vision and acuity, at light levels present during the day. Loss of cones leads to full blindness as early as five years old, but may not onset until many years later. There have been multiple hypotheses about how the lack of rod cells can lead to the death of cone cells. Pinpointing a mechanism for RP is difficult because there are more than 39 genetic loci and genes correlated with this disease. In an effort to find the cause of RP, there have been different
Optical stretcher stretcher, it was also shown that cancerous cells differ significantly in their mechanical properties from their healthy counterparts. The authors claim that the 'optical deformability' can be used as a biomechanical marker to distinguish cancerous from healthy cells, and even that higher stages of malignancy can be detected. A typical optical stretcher setup consists of the following main parts: Objects trapped in the optical stretcher usually have diameters on the scale of 10 micrometer, which is very large compared to the laser wavelengths used (often 1064 nm). It is thus sufficient to consider the interaction with the laser light in