Optical nanoscopy of a living cell

Abstract

Optical nanoscopy allows to study biological and functional processes of sub-cellular organelles. In structured illumination microscopy (SIM) the sample is illuminated with a grid-like interference pattern to encode higher spatial frequency information into observable Moire patterns. By acquiring multiple images and a computation trick a superresolved image is obtained. SIM provides resolution enhancement of 2X in each axis as compared to conventional microscopes. For a visible light, SIM provides an optical resolution of 100 nm. The challenges associated with optical nanoscopy of a living cell are photo-toxicity, special dye requirements and artifacts due to cell movement. SIM works with conventional dyes and is a wide-field technique making it suitable for imaging living cells. In this work, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of imaging living cells using SIM. Two applications of optical nanoscopy of living cells will be discussed; a) imaging of mitochondria in a keratinocyte cell and Optical microscopy based on fluorescence has emerged as a vital tool in modern bio-medical imaging and diagnosis. Super-resolution bio-imaging allows gathering information from sub-cellular organelles. In structured illumination microscopy (SIM) the sample is illuminated with a grid-like interference patterns to encode higher spatial frequencies information into observable images (Moire fringes). A super-resolved image is then decoded using computational trick. In this work, we used SIM to acquired super-resolved optical images of mitochondria from a live keratinocyte cell (see Fig 1). SIM provides resolution enhancement of 2X in each axis and contrast enhancement of 8X on a projected image. Time-lapsed imaging was used to study the dynamics of mitochondria in a live cell.