Abstract
Although compelling evidence suggests that cellular nanoarchitecture and nanoscale environment where molecular interactions take place would be expected to significantly affect macromolecular processes, biological ramifications of cellular nanoscale organization have been largely unexplored. This understanding has been hampered in part by the diffraction limited resolution of optical microscopy. The talk will discuss a novel optical microscopy technique, partial wave spectroscopic (PWS) microscopy that is capable of quantifying statistical properties of cell structure at the nanoscale. Animal and human studies demonstrated that an alteration in the statistical properties of the nanoscale mass density distribution in the cell nucleus (e.g. nuclear nanoarchitecture) is one of the earliest and ubiquitous events in carcinogenesis and precedes any other known morphological changes at larger length scales (e.g. microarchitecture). This appears to be a general event in carcinogenesis, which is supported by our data in five types of cancer: colon, pancreatic, lung, esophageal and ovarian cancers.
Citation Information: Cancer Prev Res 2011;4(10 Suppl):ED01-01.
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