Development of Lipid Targeting Raman Probes for In Vivo Imaging of Caenorhabditis elegans

Abstract

A simple, sensitive, and highly specific lipid targeting Raman probe (Nile red coated silver nanoparticles) has been developed to image living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Our idea of imaging lipids in C. elegans is to combine the specificity of the fluorescent dye, Nile red, and the highly enhanced Raman scattering on the silver nanoparticles. Our strategy involves the fabrication of a lipid targeting probe, which is incorporated into the intracellular intestinal granules of C. elegans by incubating these worms in the solution containing Raman probes, resulting in an uptake and subsequent incorporation of these Raman probes into the intestinal granule, thus allowing fast visualization of lipid droplets through a conventional confocal imaging technique.

SERS Tags: Novel Optical Nanoprobes for Bioanalysis

“…179 This tag would be incorporated into the intracellular intestinal granules of C. elegans after coincubation, thus allowing fast visualization of lipid droplets through a confocal Raman imaging technique.…”

SERS in Cells: from Concepts to Practical Applications

“…This dilution of SERS nanoprobe-containing endosomes is a trivial effect in cell lines, and has also been observed in other studies [68]. However, observing particle distribution between differentiating cells in developing tissues may lead to better understanding of the distribution of cytoplasmic and nanomaterial in developing organisms [38,116]. SERS spectra of different stages of the endo-lysosomal pathway show the characteristic Raman bands of pABT.…”

Imaging and lipidomics methods for lipid analysis in metabolic and cardiovascular disease

“…CARS spectroscopy offers an effective alternative approach to visible light and fluorescence-based (vide infra) imaging techniques, 64 and does not require exogenous labels for the visualization of lipids in the biological specimens. Moreover, CARS spectroscopy allows the non-invasive quantification of lipids within live cells based on the detection of specific molecular bond vibrations, 65 , 66 such as those of C–H, C=O and P–O bonds, and can therefore be tuned to discriminate individual lipid species in complex samples 67 …”