Seo-Eun Lee, a student from the Department of Biological Sciences who graduated in February, has won the Best Paper Award in the Bio-Photonics Division at the 2014 Optical Society of Korea (OSK) Winter Conference, held from February 19 through 21 at the Daejeon Convention Center. A total of 270 papers in nine divisions were presented during the conference, and one paper from each division is given the Best Paper Award. It is very rare for an undergraduate student whose major is not in physics to receive the award.

Conventional methods of acquiring images of lipid droplets relied on fluorescent staining (label molecules) for imaging. Lipid droplets are lipid-rich cellular organelles that regulate the storage and hydrolysis of neutral lipids. Recently, studies have shown that lipid droplets play an important role in the regulation of intracellular lipid storage and lipid metabolism, which are related to metabolic disorders such as obesity, cancer, and atherosclerosis. Realizing the importance of lipid droplets, scientists have tried to observe them through fluorescent staining and electron microscopes. Fluorescent microscopes require fluorescent staining as a pre-treatment process and gradually bleaching occurs, which diminishes the light, thus long-term observations were difficult.

As a solution, Lee discovered a new way to acquire images of lipid droplets using holographic technology. Lee said in an interview, “When you take a photograph of a cell using holographic technology, since the lipids have a high refractive index, you can observe the lipid droplets without label molecules. Holography utilizes the interference between scattered and unscattered light passing through a sample and reconstructs the three-dimensional information.” The biggest feature of Lee’s work is that the cell can be observed without label molecules and that it is quantitative.

Lee has studied the cell imaging through holography during her stay in Professor Yong Keun Park from the Department of Physics as an undergraduate researcher for her individual research from June 2013. The host of the conference, OSK was founded in 1989 and has hosted its 25th annual conference this year. It is the largest academy in the field of optics in Korea and hosts academic presentations, short-term academic courses, seminars, and lectures every year.