Standing-wave-excited multiplanar fluorescence in a laser scanning microscope reveals 3D information on red blood cells

Mesoscale standing wave imaging

Standing wave (SW) microscopy is a method that uses an interference pattern to excite fluorescence from labelled cellular structures and produces high-resolution images of three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional dataset. SW microscopy is performed with high-magnification, high-numerical aperture objective lenses, and while this results in high-resolution images, the field of view is very small. Here we report upscaling of this interference imaging method from the microscale to the mesoscale using the Mesolens, which has the unusual combination of a low-magnification and high-numerical aperture. With this method, we produce SW images within a field of view of 4.4 mm × 3.0 mm that can readily accommodate over 16,000 cells in a single dataset. We demonstrate the method using both single-wavelength excitation and the multi-wavelength SW method TartanSW. We show application of the method for imaging of fixed and living cells specimens, with the first application of SW imaging to study cells under flow conditions.

A simple image processing pipeline to sharpen topology maps in multi-wavelength interference microscopy

Multi-wavelength standing wave (SW) microscopy and interference reflection microscopy (IRM) are powerful techniques that use optical interference to study topographical structure. However, the use of more than two wavelengths to image the complex cell surface results in complicated topographical maps, and it can be difficult to resolve the three-dimensional contours. We present a simple image processing method to reduce the thickness and spacing of antinodal fringes in multi-wavelength interference microscopy by up to a factor of two to produce clearer and more precise topographical maps of cellular structures. We first demonstrate this improvement using model non-biological specimens, and we subsequently demonstrate the benefit of our method for reducing the ambiguity of surface topography and revealing obscured features in live and fixed-cell specimens.

Widefield standing wave microscopy of red blood cell membrane morphology with high temporal resolution

We report the first demonstration of widefield standing wave (SW) microscopy of fluorescently labelled red blood cells at high speeds that allow for the rapid imaging of membrane deformations. Using existing and custom MATLAB functions, we also present a method to generate 2D and 3D reconstructions of the SW data for improved visualization of the cell. We compare our technique with standard widefield epifluorescence imaging and show that the SW technique not only reveals more topographical information about the specimen but does so without increasing toxicity or the rate of photobleaching and could make this a powerful technique for the diagnosis or study of red blood cell morphology and biomechanical characteristics.

Mirror-enhanced super-resolution microscopy

Axial excitation confinement beyond the diffraction limit is crucial to the development of next-generation, super-resolution microscopy. STimulated Emission Depletion (STED) nanoscopy offers lateral super-resolution using a donut-beam depletion, but its axial resolution is still over 500 nm. Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy is widely used for single-molecule localization, but its ability to detect molecules is limited to within the evanescent field of ~ 100 nm from the cell attachment surface. We find here that the axial thickness of the point spread function (PSF) during confocal excitation can be easily improved to 110 nm by replacing the microscopy slide with a mirror. The interference of the local electromagnetic field confined the confocal PSF to a 110-nm spot axially, which enables axial super-resolution with all laser-scanning microscopes. Axial sectioning can be obtained with wavelength modulation or by controlling the spacer between the mirror and the specimen. With no additional complexity, the mirror-assisted excitation confinement enhanced the axial resolution six-fold and the lateral resolution two-fold for STED, which together achieved 19-nm resolution to resolve the inner rim of a nuclear pore complex and to discriminate the contents of 120 nm viral filaments. The ability to increase the lateral resolution and decrease the thickness of an axial section using mirror-enhanced STED without increasing the laser power is of great importance for imaging biological specimens, which cannot tolerate high laser power.