Mengqiu Li - Research Student

Mengqiu Li

Telephone: 25746
Room: G22 Kroto Research Institute

Research Group

Research Project

Developing Raman Tweezers Sorting to Characterize and Isolate Microbial Cells

To date, one of the most challenging questions in microbiology is to understand genetic function of microbes in natural environment, whose number on the Earth is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of eukaryotic cells, and they play critical roles in the earth biogeochemical cycles and have a profound impact on climate change. Although microbes account for about half of total carbon in global biomass, the vast majority of microbes (>99%) in natural environment are unculturable using traditional culture-dependent approaches. Raman spectrum provides the intrinsic information of a cell and does not require any external labelling. A typical Raman spectrum contains rich cellular information, including nucleic acids, protein, carbohydrates and lipids. My project is to use Raman tweezers to sort bacterial cells based on their Raman spectra. Raman tweezers would open a new frontier for better understanding the behaviour of microorganisms in nature. It would help to establish the link between microbial species and their ecological functions in-situ.