Biological Lasers for Biomedical Applications

A biolaser utilizes biological materials as part of its gain medium and/or part of its cavity. It can also be a micro- or nanosized laser embedded/integrated within biological materials. The biolaser employs lasing emission rather than regular fluorescence as the sensing signal and therefore has a number of unique advantages that can be explored for broad applications in biosensing, labeling, tracking, contrast agent development, and bioimaging. This article reports on the progress in biolasers with focus on the work done in the past five years. In the end, the possible future directions of the biolaser are discussed.