Detection of living cervical cancer cells by transient terahertz spectroscopy

Abstract

The photonic energy of terahertz wave is in the same order of magnitude as the rotational and vibrational energy levels of organic and biological macromolecules, so it has unique advantages in detecting cells and biological macromolecules. However, in the life environment, the dynamic time scale of cell-environment interaction and structural conformation change of biological macromolecules are within picosecond to millisecond, and water has strong absorption to terahertz wave, which has become the bottleneck problem for the detection of cells and biological macromolecules by terahertz technology. In this article, we developed a set of terahertz single measurement system based on the tilt wave front of grating pulse technique. The system was employed for the terahertz detection of trace living cervical cancer cells. We achieved transient detection of the terahertz pulse time-domain waveform of the living HeLa cells. The characteristic absorption peaks were identified by Lambert-Beer law, respectively, at 0.49, 0.71, 1.04, 1.07, 1.26 and 1.37 THz. The absorbance is proportional to the cell concentration.

Novel Terahertz Spectroscopy Technology for Crystallinity and Crystal Structure Analysis of Cellulose

“…It was focused on the terahertz absorption peak characteristics of cellulose at low frequency bands in the range of 0.2-3.0 THz, providing a theoretical basis for the application of fiber materials [24]. The results showed that the crystallinity of cellulose from theory calculations were different between the terahertz spectroscopy detection and traditional analysis [25], while the terahertz spectroscopy detection showed more clearly and intuitively crystallinity characteristics. The absorption peak of the terahertz spectra was the most apparent when the samples' thickness and ratio were specific.…”

Perspective on Terahertz Applications in Bioscience and Biotechnology

“…As a key illustration of this unfortunately not-uncommon issue, we consider the question of the existence in the THz range of spectrally narrow, well-resolved vibrational resonances in biological media. Despite numerous claims to the contrary, in both older and more recent , publications, condensed-phase material systems that lack long-range crystalline order (including living cells and tissues, as well as biological molecules in solution or randomly aggregated on a surface) simply cannot exhibit well-resolved peaks in linear absorption spectra at frequencies up to a few terahertz. Such claims abound in the literature (e.g., refs , , and ), generally without the minimal corroborating evidence of being reproduced by independent researchers in a different lab, suggesting that reports of these resonant features are easy to publish, if not easy to substantiate.…”

Effect of THz spectra of L-Arginine molecules by the combination of water molecules

“…Terahertz (THz) technology is of great significance in organisms, biological macromolecules, nucleic acids, proteins, and sugars because it can provide the information that usually cannot be obtained directly through detection methods of optical, X-ray, and nuclear magnetic resonance ( Peng et al., 2020 ; Liu et al., 2019 ; Zhu et al., 2021 ). To date, the THz method has been successfully applied to molecular and cell biology ( Shi et al., 2020 ; Penkov and Fesenko, 2020 ; Nagai et al., 2005 ; Wang et al., 2021 ). However, most of these existing works focus on solid anhydrous substance, whereas aqueous solutions are rarely studied.…”