Label-free evanescent microscopy for membrane nano-tomography in living cells

Lamellipod Reconstruction by Three-Dimensional Reflection Interference Contrast Nanoscopy (3D-RICN)

There are very few techniques to reconstruct the shape of a cell at nanometric resolution, and those that exist are almost exclusively based on fluorescence, implying limitations due to staining constraints and artifacts. Reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM), a label-free technique, permits the measurement of nanometric distances between refractive objects. However, its quantitative application to cells has been largely limited due to the complex interferometric pattern caused by multiple reflections on internal or thin structures like lamellipodia. Here we introduce 3D reflection interference contrast nanoscopy, 3D-RICN, which combines information from multiple illumination wavelengths and aperture angles to characterize the lamellipodial region of an adherent cell in terms of its distance from the surface and its thickness. We validate this new method by comparing data obtained on fixed cells imaged with atomic force microscopy and quantitative phase imaging. We show that as expected, cells adhering to micropatterns exhibit a radial symmetry for the lamellipodial thickness. We demonstrate that the substrate-lamellipod distance may be as high as 100 nm. We also show how the method applies to living cells, opening the way for label-free dynamical study of cell structures with nanometric resolution.

Phase imaging and synthetic aperture super-resolution via total internal reflection microscopy

Total internal reflection microscopy is mainly used in its fluorescence mode and is the reference technique to image fluorescent proteins in the vicinity of cell membranes. Here, we show that this technique can easily become a phase microscope by simply detecting the coherent signal resulting from the interference between the field scattered by the probed sample and the total internal reflection. Moreover, combining several illumination angles permits generating synthetic aperture reconstructions with improved resolutions compared to standard label-free microscopy techniques.

Modern trends in biophotonics for clinical diagnosis and therapy to solve unmet clinical needs

This contribution covers recent original research papers in the biophotonics field. The content is organized into main techniques such as multiphoton microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography and photoacoustic tomography, and their applications in the context of fluid, cell, tissue and skin diagnostics. Special attention is paid to vascular and blood flow diagnostics, photothermal and photodynamic therapy, tissue therapy, cell characterization, and biosensors for biomarker detection.

Label-Free Classification of Bax/Bak Expressing vs. Double-Knockout Cells

We combine optical scatter imaging with principal component analysis (PCA) to classify apoptosis-competent Bax/Bak-expressing, and apoptosis resistant Bax/Bak-null immortalized baby mouse kidney cells. We apply PCA to 100 stacks each containing 236 dark-field cell images filtered with an optically implemented Gabor filter with period between 0.3 and 2.9 μm. Each stack yields an "eigencell" image corresponding to the first principal component obtained at one of the 100 Gabor filter periods used. At each filter period, each cell image is multiplied by (projected onto) the eigencell image. A Feature Matrix consisting of 236 × 100 scalar values is thus constructed with significantly reduced dimension compared to the initial dataset. Utilizing this Feature Matrix, we implement a supervised linear discriminant analysis and classify successfully the Bax/Bak-expressing and Bax/Bak-null cells with 94.7% accuracy and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.993. Applying a feature selection algorithm further reveals that the Gabor filter period ranges most significant for the classification correspond to both large (likely nuclear) features as well as small sized features (likely organelles present in the cytoplasm). Our results suggest that cells with a genetic defect in their apoptosis pathway can be differentiated from their normal counterparts by label-free multi-parametric optical scatter data.