New Method Could Improve Ultrasound Imaging

One day while casually reading a review article, Caltech chemical engineer Mikhail Shapiro came across a mention of gas vesicles—tiny gas-filled structures used by some photosynthetic microorganisms to control buoyancy. It was a light-bulb moment. Shapiro is always on the lookout for new ways to enhance imaging techniques such as ultrasound or MRI, and the natural nanostructures seemed to be just the ticket to improve ultrasound imaging agents.

Now Shapiro and his colleagues from UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto have shown that these gas vesicles, isolated from bacteria and from archaea (a separate lineage of single-celled organisms), can indeed be used for ultrasound imaging. The vesicles could one day help track and reveal the growth, migration, and activity of a variety of cell types—from neurons to tumor cells—using noninvasive ultrasound, one of the most widely used imaging modalities in biomedicine.

A paper describing the work appears as an advance online publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. 

"People have struggled to make synthetic nanoscale imaging agents for ultrasound for many years," says Shapiro. "To me, it’s quite amazing that we can borrow something that nature has evolved for a completely different purpose and use it for in vivo ultrasound imaging. It shows just how much nature has to offer us as engineers."

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