Dr. Eva Schmid, Postdoctoral Fellow at Dr. Daniel Fletcher’s laboratory at the Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, presented her work on developing CellScope at the annual ASCB 2012 meeting in San Francisco. CellScope is a rugged hand held microscope that can be mounted on a cell phone, or even an iPad, and uses its optics to generate a high resolution picture. The microscope is designed to generate high resolution images that are capable of disease diagnosis outside of a traditional laboratory. In fact this was the reason for developing CellScope; as a tool for disease diagnosis in developing countries.
However, a serendipitous meeting with Saber Khan, a middle school teacher at Friends School in San Francisco, evolved this into a fun and an exciting teaching tool for school kids. The middle school students got engaged in completing a Micro-Macro project where they took macroscopic and microscopic pictures of objects around their homes and neighborhood like leavers, petals, pets, pet- hair, etc. “The response of the students was phenomenal,” says Mr. Saber Khan. The students also realize that this fun learning tool has the ability to be used as a real diagnostic instrument capable of impacting global health.
Who knew, a cell phone would become a teacher’s friend.
Another application is, of course, using this very portable device for research in the field. University of Hawaii researchers have used CellScope to monitor plankton diversity. CellScope has also been used to monitor coral reefs for coral bleaching. At the end of the day, it’s just really cool and a regular old microscope just won’t do under the Christmas tree anymore. I wish I had a CellScope to bring on my next wilderness hike.
Blog