Washington, December 4: Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have shown that ultraviolet light can be used to sculpt three-dimensional microparticles, which may have many applications in medical diagnostics and tissue engineering.
The researchers say that their technique may give microparticles a design that is useful for probes to identify DNA and other molecules, or to release medicines or nutrients.
They say that the new technique offers unprecedented control over the size, shape and texture of the particles, and allows the designing of particles with specific chemical properties such as porosity—a measure of the void space in a material that can affect how fast different molecules can diffuse through the particles.