Abstract
Laser guidance technique employs the optical forces generated from a focused Gaussian laser beam incident on a biological cell to trap and guide the cell along the laser propagation direction. The optical force, which determines the guidance speed, is dependent on the cellular characteristics of the cell being guided, such as size, shape, composition and morphology. Different cell populations or subpopulations can be detected without any fluorescent markers by measuring their guidance speeds. We found that cell guidance speeds were sensitive enough to monitor the subtle changes during the progression of mouse fibroblast cells from normal to cancerous phenotype. The results also demonstrated that this technique can effectively distinguish mouse mammary cancerous cells with different metastatic competence. Laser guidance technique can be used as a label-free cell detection method for basic cell biological investigation and cancer diagnosis.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ashkin A (1998) Forces of a single-beam gradient laser trap on a dielectric sphere in the ray optics regime. Methods Cell Biol 55:1–27
Bacac M, Stamenkovic I (2008) Metastatic cancer cell. Annu Rev Pathol 3:221–247
Beuthan J, Minet O, Helfmann J, Herrig M, Muller G (1996) The spatial variation of the refractive index in biological cells. Phys Med Biol 41(3):369–382
Buckman JF, Hernandez H, Kress GJ, Votyakova TV, Pal S, Reynolds IJ (2001) MitoTracker labeling in primary neuronal and astrocytic cultures: influence of mitochondrial membrane potential and oxidants. J Neurosci Methods 104(2):165–176
Chan JW, Lieu DK (2009) Label-free biochemical characterization of stem cells using vibrational spectroscopy. J Biophotonics 2(11):656–668
Choi WJ, Jeon Do I, Ahn SG, Yoon JH, Kim S, Lee BH (2010) Full-field optical coherence microscopy for identifying live cancer cells by quantitative measurement of refractive index distribution. Opt Express 18(22):23285–23295
Curl CL, Bellair CJ, Harris T, Allman BE, Harris PJ, Stewart AG, Roberts A, Nugent KA, Delbridge LM (2005) Refractive index measurement in viable cells using quantitative phase-amplitude microscopy and confocal microscopy. Cytometry A 65(1):88–92
Dainiak MB, Kumar A, Galaev IY, Mattiasson B (2007) Methods in cell separations. Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol 106:1–18
Ibrahim SF, van den Engh G (2007) Flow cytometry and cell sorting. Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol 106:19–39
Kim SB, Song DK, Kim SS (2007) Optical differential mobility analyzer for micron size colloidal particles: theoretical approach. J Colloid Interface Sci 311(1):102–109
Ma Z, Burg KJ, Wei Y, Yuan XC, Peng X, Gao BZ (2008) Laser-guidance based detection of cells with single-gene modification. Appl Phys Lett 92(21):213902–2139023
Ma Z, Yun JX, Wei YZ, Burg KJ, Yuan XC, Gao BZ (2009) Laser guidance-based cell detection. Proc SPIE 7400:1–11
MacDonald MP, Neale S, Paterson L, Richies A, Dholakia K, Spalding GC (2004) Cell cytometry with a light touch: sorting microscopic matter with an optical lattice. J Biol Regul Homeost Agents 18(2):200–205
Mohamed H, McCurdy LD, Szarowski DH, Duva S, Turner JN, Caggana M (2004) Development of a rare cell fractionation device: application for cancer detection. IEEE Trans Nanobiosci 3(4):251–256
Sridharan M, Wei Z, Peng X, Gao BZ (2005) Cell diagnosis based on optical forces. Proc SPIE 5930:1–13
Sun YY, Yuan XC, Ong LS, Bu J, Zhu SW, Liu R (2007) Large-scale optical traps on a chip for optical sorting. Appl Phys Lett 90(3)
Vanvlasselaer P (1995) Density adjusted cell sorting (Dacs), a novel method to purify rare cell-populations such as Cd34 hematopoietic stem cell. J Cell Biochem 10–10
Wei YC, Sticca RP, Li J et al (2007) Combined treatment of dendritoma vaccine and low-dose interleukin-2 in stage IV renal cell carcinoma patients induced clinical response: a pilot study. Oncol Rep 18(3):665–671
Yang J, Mani SA, Donaher JL et al (2004) Twist, a master regulator of morphogenesis, plays an essential role in tumor metastasis. Cell 117(7):927–939
Acknowledgment
This work has been partially supported by NIH SC INBRE (2p20rr16461-05 and its supplementary grant 3P20RR016461-09S2), and NSF MRI (CBET-0923311).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ma, Z., Gao, B.Z. Laser-guidance based cell detection for identifying malignant cancerous cells without any fluorescent markers. Biotechnol Lett 33, 1767–1772 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-011-0649-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-011-0649-x