“Caged” compounds are reactive molecules that have been protected from their environments using chemical configurations that are essentially non reactive without intervention. In this case the intervention is the intense UV laser beam(355 nm). This breaks the “cage” releasing the active compound into the cell or medium. The advantage of this technique is that it can be performed very specifically in certain cells in a tissue culture disk, while still allowing cells at a remote area to be used as a control population (this may be impacted by the nature of the activation process of course).
