Warm-Blooded animals radiate heat as infrared light, so they appear to glow when viewed with an infrared camera. Now a researcher in the US believes that mammalian cells have an 'eye' with which they may actually be able to detect this glow.
Last year, Guenter Albrecht-Buehler of the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago demonstrated that mouse cells growing in culture will stretch towards sources of infrared light (The Journal of Cell Biology, vol 114, p 493). He has shown that cells may 'see' nearby cells by detecting infrared light.
To investigate this remarkable heat-seeking ability, Albrecht-Buehler studied hamster cells, which are elongated in shape. He placed these cells on one side of a thin sheet of glass, and watched them grow more or less parallel to each other in a single layer. He then put cells on the other side of the glass, spread so that most of them ...
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