Light has been central in biological sciences to visually investigate cells. In recent years it has increasingly been used to also manipulate biological samples by optically induced forces. Besides trapping, moving, and rotating cells optical traps can also deform cells in a controlled and nondestructive way. The deformation of cells with such an optical stretcher can be used to gain insight into the structural properties of the cytoskeleton of cells. In addition, the deformability of cells has turned out to be a very sensitive inherent cell marker for any physiological or pathological change that is mirrored in the cytoskeleton. An optical stretcher, integrated into an appropriate microfluidic system, can thus be used to diagnose cancer and to identify and sort stem cells from heterogeneous populations with relatively high-throughput. In turn, cells can also manipulate light. Current research shows that there are glial cells in the retina that serve as optical fibers and that optics can even drive evolution in the inversion of the chromatin architecture in the rod photoreceptor nuclei of nocturnal animals. These discoveries shed new light on the retina as an optical system, which is reminiscent of a fiber-optic plate, and might help explain the paradox of its inverted structure.

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