Guest Editorial Introduction to JSTQE Issue on Nanobiophotonics

The papers in this special section focus on nanobiophotonics. This is an emerging field of modern science and biomedical nanotechnology. This new field continues to vastly expand with state-of-the-art developments across the entire spectrum of biomedical applications ranging from fundamental studies of light-nanobiomaterial interactions to clinical diagnostics and therapeutics. In nanobiophotonics research areas, there has been a great impetus recently for the development of noninvasive imaging and sensing of intracellular structures and cellular functions as well as obtaining quantitative information for light-tissue interactions at the cellular, intracellular, and molecular level. Existing photonics technologies provide unique capabilities for investigating these scientific questions in terms of using non-ionizing optical radiation for providing noninvasive intracellular, cellular, and tissue imaging, and in-vivo sensing with ultrahigh resolution in the subwavelength nanoscale range (smaller than 100 nm). Furthermore, recent technology development efforts leverage the advanced features of photonics to move beyond the diffraction limit, providing sub-nanometer resolution into cellular processes.