Tiny, Wireless Antennas Now Used To Monitor Cellular Communication

As the world continues its scientific march forward, it has now been proven that tiny wireless antennas can be used to monitor cellular communication.

These tiny, wireless antennas can do these using light, according to latest scientific findings.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States of America (USA), developed a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires for the purpose.

Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals, and help researchers decode intricate electrical signals sent by cells, and this aids in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.

According to a Science Daily report, devices that record electrical signals in cell cultures and other liquid environments often use wires to connect each electrode on the device to its respective amplifier.

However, because only so many wires can be connected to the device, this restricts the number of recording sites, limiting the information that can be collected from cells.

Somehow, the MIT researchers came to the rescue, by developing a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires. Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals.”

Small electrical changes in the surrounding liquid environment alter how the antennas scatter the light. Using an array of tiny antennas, each of which is one-hundredth the width of a human hair, the researchers could measure electrical signals exchanged between cells, with extreme spatial resolution, the journal said.

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It added that the devices, which are durable enough to continuously record signals for more than 10 hours, could help biologists understand how cells communicate in response to changes in their environment.

Such scientific insights could pave the way for advancements in diagnosis, spur the development of targeted treatments, and enable more precision in the evaluation of new therapies.

“Being able to record the electrical activity of cells with high throughput and high resolution remains a real problem. We need to try some innovative ideas and alternate approaches,” says Benoît Desbiolles, a former postdoc in the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper on the devices.

“Bioelectricity is fundamental to the functioning of cells and different life processes. However, recording such electrical signals precisely has been challenging,” says Sarkar.

The report said the researchers set out to design a biosensing device that didn’t need wires or amplifiers, which would be easier to use for biologists who may not be familiar with electronic instruments.

“We wondered if we could make a device that converts the electrical signals to light and then use an optical microscope, the kind that is available in every biology lab, to probe these signals,” Desbiolles says.

For the team of scientists, discovering tiny, wireless antennas that can be used to monitor cellular communication was not an easy exercise.

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Initially, they used a special polymer called PEDOT:PSS to design nanoscale transducers that incorporated tiny pieces of gold filament.

The report said gold nanoparticles were supposed to scatter the light — a process that would be induced and modulated by the polymer. But the results weren’t matching up with their theoretical model, even as the researchers tried removing the gold and, surprisingly, the results matched the model much more closely.

“It turns out we weren’t measuring signals from the gold, but from the polymer itself. This was a very surprising but exciting result. We built on that finding to develop organic electro-scattering antennas,” he says.