Laser particle activated cell sorting in microfluidics
A microfluidic device is developed that uses the narrowband optical radiation of laser particle barcodes to sort tagged cells.
37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
Engineering topics
Martino, Nicola
Publications and source records attributed to Martino, Nicola.
Laser particles with omnidirectional emission for cell tracking
The ability to track individual cells in space over time is crucial to analyzing heterogeneous cell populations. Recently, microlaser particles have emerged as unique optical probes for massively multiplexed single-cell tagging. However, the microlaser far-field emission is inherently direction-dependent, which causes strong intensity fluctuations when the orientation of the particle varies randomly inside cells. Here, we demonstrate a general solution based on the incorporation of nanoscale light scatterers into microlasers. Two schemes are developed by introducing either boundary defects or a scattering layer into microdisk lasers. The resulting laser output is omnidirectional, with the minimum-to-maximum ratio of the angle-dependent intensity improving from 0.007 (-24 dB) to > 0.23 (-6 dB). After transfer into live cells in vitro, the omnidirectional laser particles within moving cells could be tracked continuously with high signal-to-noise ratios for 2 h, while conventional microlasers exhibited frequent signal loss causing tracking failure.
59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗