A Big Magnet in a Small Fish - ScienceNOW: Now, for the first time in any animal, scientists have isolated magnetic cells in the fish that respond to these fields...
The challenge in isolating magnetic cells is that they are few and far between—if they were clustered together they would interfere with each other's magnetism. "If you have a tissue containing these cells, it's likely that only one out of ten thousand cells is magnetic..."
To isolate magnetic cells from their non-magnetic neighbors, Winklhofer and his collaborators placed a suspension of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) cells under a microscope that had a magnet rotating around the stage that the sample sat on...
And surprisingly, the magnetism in each cell was tens to hundreds of times stronger than researchers had hypothesized, says Winklhofer...
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