Nanodiamonds are microscopic carbon crystals that are similar in structure to natural diamonds.
A few years ago, scientists from Queenslanduniversities using nanodiamonds have learned to measure the temperature inside living cells. Thanks to this, scientists have identified their hottest areas and understood the conditions under which the most important reactions take place inside the body.
It also turned out that the temperature of individual regions of the cell varies greatly, which casts doubt on theories describing the vital activity of cells, and therefore caused controversy among scientists.
In order to resolve them, assistant professorAt the University of Queensland, Taras Plakhotnik and his colleagues, using specially created nanodiamonds, measured the temperature in different parts of the same cells at the same time: this was necessary to calculate the average rate at which heat spreads through human cells.
Next, the nanodiamonds were coated with a thin layerPolydopamine is a polymer that can absorb laser light and simultaneously convert it into heat and other forms of radiation. Physicists introduced the resulting nanodegrees into individual cancer cells and began to illuminate the diamonds one by one, while simultaneously measuring how quickly they cooled.
As a result, it turned out that different areas of the cell cytoplasm conducted heat at different rates. It turned out that cells conduct heat several times worse than pure water.
Physicists hope that further observations of how heat diffuses in specific cell organelles will help them understand why the thermal conductivity of the cell is so variable and on what it depends.
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