There are many medical systems that have been created in recent decades thanks to the advancement of technology and that have been of great help to make advances and scientific studies that later have helped to develop many techniques to find certain diseases. On this occasion, thanks to an almost transparent material, it has been possible to see the electrical movement in the cells.
A group of researchers from the University of California have created a “camera” made with graphene that can observe electrical actions in living cells, something very difficult to achieve with other traditional mechanisms.
The importance of graphene
However, this system is not a traditional camera, but rather uses this material that when it is discharged with electricity, generates a kind of mirror effect. In addition, this material is very hard and a great conductor of electricity , which means that it has been used a lot in recent years by many scientists when conducting their experiments.
However, for this type of task it is a novelty that graphene is used, since other types of materials have always been used when trying to see the behavior of cells that are alive, such as microelectrodes , which now they see in this new material their substitute.
Its low cost and its great efficiency when carrying out its work also make graphene a very dynamic material.
To verify its operation, tissue samples from the muscles of living animals were used to which electrical discharges were applied in order to check how the graphene towards the reflex effect. The results were a complete success.
An effective new technology
The scientists responsible for this mechanism not only wanted to check the electrical activity of the cells in the muscles, but also in the cells of the brain , since electrical signals are already used in this area to carry out communication and attitude tasks.
The structure of the cell allows them to act as conductors of electricity, facilitating the process. Thanks to this graphene “camera”, images of the entire part of the body in which the electric discharges are being applied can be obtained.
For a long time, researchers knew that graphene was a material that had great qualities related to the passage of electricity. Thanks to him, it was possible to capture something marvelous on a medical and scientific level that was how all the cells of a heart contracted when a beat occurred and then relaxed when that beat ended.
