Great news: Another paper using LUMICKS technology was published, this time in Nature! Congratulations to the authors. Several are now part of LUMICKS.
In the study “Sliding sleeves of XRCC4-XLF bridge DNA and connect fragments of broken DNA” Brouwer et al. describe how XRCC4 and XLF proteins play a crucial role in non-homologous end joining, a repair mechanism of double-strand DNA breaks. Two DNA strands were trapped independently using four optical traps and a break was induced. By visualizing the proteins and measuring the force they found that the repair proteins form bridges and hold the DNA together. These bridges are extremely strong, can slide along the DNA and specifically bind to DNA ends. The full article can be found here.
The technique used in this paper is made commercially available by LUMICKS. Read more about the C-Trap™ optical tweezers-fluorescence microscope and the u-Flux™ microfluidics system.