Abstract
We demonstrate a microscopic instrument that can measure subcellular texture arising from organelle morphology and organization within unstained living cells. The proposed instrument extends the sensitivity of label-free optical microscopy to nanoscale changes in organelle size and shape and can be used to accelerate the study of the structure-function relationship pertaining to organelle dynamics underlying fundamental biological processes, such as programmed cell death or cellular differentiation. The microscope can be easily implemented on existing microscopy platforms, and can therefore be disseminated to individual laboratories, where scientists can implement and use the proposed methods with unrestricted access.
The proposed technique is able to characterize subcellular structure by observing the cell through two-dimensional optical Gabor filters. These filters can be tuned to sense with nanoscale (10's of nm) sensitivity, specific morphological attributes pertaining to the size and orientation of non-spherical subcellular organelles. While based on contrast generated by elastic scattering, the technique does not rely on a detailed inverse scattering model or on Mie theory to extract morphometric measurements. This technique is therefore applicable to non-spherical organelles for which a precise theoretical scatter description is not easily given, and provides distinctive morphometric parameters that can be obtained within unstained living cells to assess their function. The technique is advantageous compared with digital image processing in that it operates directly on the object's field transform rather than the discretized object's intensity. It does not rely on high image sampling rates and can therefore be used to rapidly screen morphological activity within hundreds of cells at a time, thus greatly facilitating the study of organelle structure beyond individual organelle segmentation and reconstruction by fluorescence confocal microscopy of highly magnified digital images of limited fields of view.
In this demonstration we show data from a marine diatom to illustrate the methodology. We also show preliminary data collected from living cells to give an idea of how the method may be applied in a relevant biological context.