Trinity College is now home to Ireland’s first and only "BioBrillouin" microscope. The device is expected to enable strides in the fields of inflammation, cancer, developmental biology, and biomedical materials, among other research areas. Cellular and tissue mechanics are potent regulators of disease, dysfunction and regeneration, and understanding them is thus a major focus of biomedical researchers. But existing methods are invasive and limited in the information that they can provide. The Brillouin microscope, however, can map and quantify the compressibility, viscoelasticity, and the detailed mechanics of materials and biological tissues, using non-invasive light. This allows researchers to assess the mechanical properties of live systems, such as cells and tissues, without interfering with them, enabling them to monitor a system and how it changes over time. Diana Eveline Sanchez Amador, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Engineering in Trinity College Dublin, using the "BioBrillouin" microscope. Courtesy of Trinity College Dublin. The technology leverages light scattering as a result of interactions between photons and the acoustic phonons of a material, which are impacted by the material’s mechanical properties. With support from the European Research Council (ERC) and Research Ireland, the system has been installed in the lab of Michael Monaghan in the School of Engineering at Trinity, where it is housed in the Trinity Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute. “Being the first commercial system in the world, we have tremendous technical support from the vendor, CellSense Technologies GmbH, with whom we have worked closely with to get the system on the ground. Our success is their success,” said Monaghan, a contributor to an expert consensus paper recently published in Nature Photonics. The paper gathers the expertise of international experts in the application of Brillouin microscopy in biomedical applications. “Studying the mechanical properties of live systems is hugely relevant in myriad fields, and promises to enable leaps forward in our understanding of the ways in which inflammation and cancer develop, for example,” Monaghan said. “However, it’s also important to understand its use is not limited to biomedical research and related applications — it will help scientists push boundaries even further in fields such as materials science, [information and communication technology], energy storage, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices and diagnostics.” The equipment, he said, will help to push frontier scientists and has already begun to attract international collaboration.