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Graham D Wright, Jochen Arlt, Wilson CK Poon, and Nick D Read (2005)
Measuring Fungal Growth Forces with Optical Tweezers
In: Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation II, edited by Dholakia, K. and Spalding, G. C.. SPIE, pages 59300F.
Optical tweezers are proving themselves useful and powerful tools in many areas of biological research, including fungal cell biology. Here we investigate their potential as a novel method for measuring the growth forces of fungal hyphae. We have calibrated the trapping forces produced by our tweezers system, and using beads have investigated whether growing hyphae can overcome this force and push beads out of the trap. Although 4 um beads were pushed out of the trap by fungal hyphae, using 1 µm beads produced some more intriguing results. The problems encountered with this method of measurement and possible solutions are discussed.
Conference on Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation II, AUG , 2005, San Diego, CA