Biophysics? The Way We Study the Stuff We Can’t See

Having just joined Lawrence Technological University in August 2024, Sonali Gandhi, Ph.D., is already helping us to “see” things differently. LTU’s first biophysicist to join the physics team, she is establishing an Experimental Biophysics Laboratory so that “we can study microscopic organelles, cell’s internal organs, through fluorescence microscopes. This way, we can conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis on micron-scale samples that are too small to see with the naked eye,” she explained.

Building the Experimental Biophysics Laboratory isn’t all Gandhi has been up to since she came to LTU. She’s been teaching the core courses University Physics 1 and University Physics Lab which are required for most students regardless of their chosen degree program.

Gandhi is looking forward to providing a place where her students can get hands-on skills and experience in conducting experiments and research with the use of optics on synthetic lipids.

“From my early undergraduate physics studies, I was always fascinated by optics,” Gandhi said. “Biophysics is a field of physics that deals with optics and micron-scale structures. If you want to study the smallest molecules or other tiny structures that we can’t see with our eyes, you need to magnify them. That’s called optics.” As a graduate student, she built such a magnifying system, called a fluorescence spectroscopy, “with lasers, mirrors, and cameras to research lipids and neutral lipids and the kinetics and dynamics of the lipid molecules,” Gandhi explained. Her new lab will continue research in biomembrane physics using a confocal microscope.

Two articles published during her Ph.D. research demonstrate her interest in and work with biophysics to conduct invitro analysis of model lipids. One titled “Four-color fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy with one laser and one camera” appeared in “Biomedical Optics Express” in 2023. A second article, published in “Cell Reports Methods” in 2024, was titled “Methods for making and observing model lipid droplets.”

As Gandhi explains it, here’s why: “Cells are fundamental to life; every living organism is made out of cells. These cells are protected from the outside environment through organelles known as cell membranes. Thus, cell membranes are very important for cells and are made of numerous lipids. Studying these lipids is crucial to understanding how cells function. We need high-throughput optics to study micron-scale lipids. For these articles, I built and used fluorescence techniques that helped me to study the mobility and interacting behavior of such lipids. My technique was to study four different color (wavelength) fluorescent molecules to understand their simultaneous functions. I have used a variety of samples that were made from synthetic lipids either in lipid bilayer form or lipid monolayer form. My study helped us to understand how fast or slow such lipid molecules move and their interactions with membrane-bound proteins.”

As lipids serve as the building blocks of all living cells, studying how complex organisms have evolved from a single cell is another means to learn about life as we know it today and how it will continue to advance.