Welcome to our Monthly Journal Club! Each month I post a paper or two that I have read and find interesting. I use this as a forum for open discussion about the paper in question. Anyone can participate in the journal club, and provide comments/critiques on the paper. I picked this months paper because it is just too cool not to talk about! Published just a couple of days ago online, this month’s paper is “Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae” by Xue Tian and colleagues at University of Science & Technology of China. I will provide a brief overview of the techniques/approaches used to make it more understandable to potential non-expert readers. If I can’t figure something out, I’ll just say so.

Have you ever wanted to see like a rattlesnake? Have you ever yearned to have ‘thermal vision’, the type you’ve undoubtedly seen on an average episode of “Cops”? Well, thanks to recent advances in science, you may soon be able to! Our vision is restricted to wavelengths of light falling between 400 and 700 nm…that’s it, everything you’ve ever seen or can ever see is due to your retina interpreting light in this range. This is great, but it is so limiting, so much so that most people never even think about what they are missing in the non-visible range of light. Indeed, things we can see fall into < 1% of the total range of the electromagnetic spectrum (see below; visible + non-visible). Imagine what we could see with 2% of the spectrum covered!

To expand the visual capabilities of mice into the near-infrared (NIR) range, the researchers developed a nanoparticle based ‘nanoantenna’ that is injectable (into the eye), self-powered, and binds normal photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the retina. These retinal photoreceptor-binding up-conversion nanoparticles (pbUCNPs) work as mini-transducers, capable of transforming NIR light into short wavelength (visible) emissions in vivo (that is, in the living animal), that the mouse can then see normally. (Image credits: Steven White, Quora.com; Newpaper24.com)