Measuring biomolecules’ mass with light

Until recently, consensus was that detecting single molecules with light called for fluorescence techniques. Light, with its long wavelength in relation to the size of a molecule, interacts too weakly with such small objects.

So when Philipp Kukura at the University of Oxford, UK, showed that it is possible to detect the minute amount of light scattered by single biomolecules, it formed the basis for a wholly new addition to the bioanalytical toolkit.