Engineers from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using small changes in the optical properties of  single living cells to measure their growth.

“Determining the growth patterns of single cells,” the researchers write, “offers answers to some of the most elusive questions in contemporary cell biology: how cell growth is regulated and how cell size distributions are maintained.”

via Futurity.org – Optics used to track single cell’s growth.