India, April 15 -- The tool achieves incredibly high imaging resolution, as it can detect the stiffness of objects down to billionths of a metre (nanometres), through a physical phenomenon called Brillouin scattering, where a laser beam interacts with the natural stiffness of a specimen. The team used this to help biologists visualise the 3D stiffness of a microscopic organism, called Caenorhabditis elegans - a free-living worm, known scientifically as a nematode. They were able to provide visualisation and material information about an elusive part of the organism's anatomy, the cuticle, that up until now had only been imaged through electron microscopes in non-living conditions.

Dr Veeren Chauhan, co-author and Assistant Professor in W...