QPI assay of fibroblasts resilience to adverse effects of nanoGO clusters by multimodal and multiscale microscopy

Abstract

Graphene is considered a possible drug deliver in nanomedicine for its mechanical, physical and chemical characteristics. Thus, studying graphene biocompatibility is pivotal to contribute to the modern nano-therapy science. The coexistence between cells and graphene should be analysed using non-invasive technologies and thus quantitative phase imaging (QPI) modalities are suitable to investigate the morphometric evolution of cells under nanomaterial exposure. Here, we show how a multimodal QPI approach can furnish a noninvasive analysis for probing the dose-dependent effect of nanoGO clusters on adherent NIH 3T3 fibroblast cells. We rely on both digital holography and Fourier ptychography (FP) in transmission microscopy mode. The former allows accurate time-lapse experiments at the single cell level. The latter provides a wide field of view characterization at the cells network level, thus assuring a significant statistical measurement by exploiting the intrinsic large space-bandwidth product of FP. The combination of these two techniques allows one to extract multimodal information about the cell resilience to adverse effects of nanoGO in the surrounding buffer, namely through quantitative, multi-scale, and time-resolved characterization.