Mathies images visual detection

November 11, 2005 Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry and member of the Bioengineering Graduate Group, has completed groundbreaking research on the chemistry of vision. Published today in Science and covered in the San Francisco Chronicle, his group reports using femtosecond-stimulated Raman spectroscopy to image the structural changes to the molecule rhodpsin as light is absorbed in the eye. The studies by the UC Berkeley Center for Analytical Biotechnology are among the first to use these super-fast laser device for taking images of fleeting events at a tiny scale.