Multimodal Nonlinear Optical Imaging of Live Cells Using Plasmon-Coupled DNA-Mediated Gold Nanoprism Assembly

Abstract

Multiphoton excitation microscopy techniques are the emerging nonlinear optical (NLO) imaging methods to watch the biological world due its ability to penetrate deep into living tissues. Driven by the need to develop multimodal NLO imaging probe, current article reports the design of DNA-mediated gold nanoprisms assembly based optical antennas to enhance multiphoton imaging capability in biological II window. Reported experimental data show a unique way to enhance second harmonic generation (SHG) and two-photon fluorescence (TPF) properties by several orders of magnitudes via plasmon coupled organization into gold nanoprism assembly structures. Experimental and theoretical modeling data using finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations indicate that huge enhancement of SHG and TPF properties are mainly due to the electric quadrupole contribution and electric field enhancement. Using 1100 nm biological II window light, reported results demonstrated that antibody conjugated assembly structures are capable of exhibiting highly selective and very bright multimodal SHG and TPF imaging of human Hep G2 liver cancer cells.

“Hot” in Plasmonics: Temperature‐Related Concepts and Applications of Metal Nanostructures

“…Similar enhancements can be observed for THG microscopy . A more recent example is shown in Figure b‐iii,iv . Figure b‐iii presents a bright‐field microscopy image of anti‐GPC3 antibody attached gold nanoprisms assembly on conjugated human Hep G2 liver cancer cells.…”

“…b‐iv) The same cells, in SHG microscopy upon illumination at 1100 nm. Reprinted with permission . Copyright 2016, American Chemical Society.…”

Polymorph dependent linear and nonlinear optical properties of naphthalenyl functionalized fluorenones

“…Besides, the coupling of nonparallel electric dipoles [50] and polarization directions [51] may also induce the formation of the "minor wings". For TPF signals of 1α, the quadrupolar mode might be related to the size of the particles [52][53][54] and the crystal symmetry along with the direction of the fluorophores in the crystal [35,54,55]. All of these are closely related with the packing mode or defects of the crystal [56,57].…”

Development of Multifunctional Fluorescent–Magnetic Nanoprobes for Selective Capturing and Multicolor Imaging of Heterogeneous Circulating Tumor Cells

“… 1 − 4 It is now well documented that circulating tumor cells (CTC) are the main vehicles of metastatic relapse. 5 − 11 Because CTC are extremely rare cells (1–10 cells/mL) in blood containing millions of leukocytes and erythrocytes cells, detecting CTC without separation from blood is highly challenging in clinics. 6 − 15 Reported clinical data show that the CTC concentration in blood can be as low as 1 per 10 7 cells; thus, effective separation, enrichment, and identification steps are necessary, even for patients with advanced cancer.…”

“…Due to epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT), CTC are undetected for more than one-third of metastatic cancer patients. 5 − 11 This article reports for the first time the development of multicolor nanodot-conjugated magnetic nanoparticle-based multifunctional fluorescent–magnetic nanoprobes which have the capability to capture and identify the heterogeneity of CTC. In our design, highly magnetic properties of multifunctional nanoprobes have been used for the separation of epithelial, mesenchymal, and stem cell CTC from whole blood samples.…”