Sachin Jagdale – Mumbai
Dr Rao Papineni’s laboratory at Carestream, US, is utilising optical imaging technologies in understanding the early responses of living systems to infection and various chemical and mechanical insults. Rao and his group show unique characteristics of plants and their response to stimuli. They observed that plants emit light when subjected to physical insults such as exposures to harmful radiation and respond differently from the normal. In addition, plants also release singlet oxygen called ROS (Reactive Oxygen Species) as a first line of defence.
The results will be presented at World Molecular Imaging Congress (WMIC 2012) to be held in Ireland soon. The results clearly show that curcumin, a compound derived from turmeric protects leaves from such UV radiation insults.
Papineni pointed to the fact that the early response characteristics seem to be similar between plants and humans. As a part of his lab’s major thrust in biomedical research, his recent work on human breast milk shows that mother’s milk is packed with good-sized ammunition of ROS defence elements and when challenged with bacteria triggers robust ROS production fighting the bacterial intruders.
“Biophotonics is a growing field bringing together cameras, optical lenses, electronics, advance software along with biology and medicine. This field of integrated technology has become a part and parcel of pre-clinical and clinical settings. Applications of these light-based technologies are seen in life science, medicine, and agriculture, particularly in microscopy and whole animal molecular imaging, almost mandatory tools in determination of the mechanism of a disease such as cancer, and in drug discovery. Currently, the technology is making an entry in hospitals, particularly in surgery suites, for image-guided surgery,” informs, Papineni.
