The same technology that lights up your LCD screen is now helping scientists at The Australian National University to unlock the secrets of living cells.

To truly understand life, biologists need to do more than just see the tiny structures inside a cell; they need to watch how the molecules that build those structures move.

Biophysicists from The John Curtin School of Medical Research, Dr Avinash Upadhya, Dr Yean Jin (Daniel) Lim, and Dr Woei Ming (Steve) Lee, recently published the findings in Optics Express.

The advancement has been achieved by incorporating a device called a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM).

An SLM is like a high-tech version of the LCD screen in your phone or laptop. It's a grid of microscopic elements, such as tiny mirrors or liquid crystals, that can be programmed individually to control light.

But instead of forming a picture to view, the SLM device is used to precisely shape and direct a powerful laser beam inside a microscope.

The Optical Biofluidic Imaging Group at JCSMR combined digital light control by SLM with two existing techniques: HILO-TIRF, for clear imaging near the cell's edge, and Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching or FRAP, used to measure molecular speed.

Their breakthrough is that the SLM acts as a dynamic light mask, allowing scientists to instantly project multiple, intricate light patterns onto the cell. With the FRAP technique, this means a laser can now ‘tag’ and track the movement of molecules at multiple locations simultaneously. Previously, this was a tedious, one-spot-at-a-time process.

By using precision to steer light, the new method can dramatically speed up complex experiments. Offering researchers a more efficient and powerful tool for studying the rapid, dynamic processes of life, including how cells signal to one another and how diseases like cancer spread.