A Bimodal Fluorescence-Raman Probe for Cellular Imaging

• Published in: Cells (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 10; no. 7; p. 1699
• Main Authors: Lin, Jiarun, Graziotto, Marcus E., Lay, Peter A., New, Elizabeth J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 05.07.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Adipocytes; Biosensors; Carbon dioxide; Cell culture; Chemistry; Ethanol; Experiments; Fluorescence; Fluorescent indicators; fluorescent probe; Fluorides; Insulin; lipid droplets; Lipids; Microscopy; multimodal imaging; Organelles; Raman spectroscopy; Sydney New South Wales Australia; Melbourne Victoria Australia; Australia; United States > US
• ISSN: 2073-4409; 2073-4409
• DOI: 10.3390/cells10071699

Biochemical changes in specific organelles underpin cellular function, and studying these changes is crucial to understand health and disease. Fluorescent probes have become important biosensing and imaging tools as they can be targeted to specific organelles and can detect changes in their chemical environment. However, the sensing capacity of fluorescent probes is highly specific and is often limited to a single analyte of interest. A novel approach to imaging organelles is to combine fluorescent sensors with vibrational spectroscopic imaging techniques; the latter provides a comprehensive map of the relative biochemical distributions throughout the cell to gain a more complete picture of the biochemistry of organelles. We have developed NpCN1, a bimodal fluorescence-Raman probe targeted to the lipid droplets, incorporating a nitrile as a Raman tag. NpCN1 was successfully used to image lipid droplets in 3T3-L1 cells in both fluorescence and Raman modalities, reporting on the chemical composition and distribution of the lipid droplets in the cells.