The optical observation of live cell behavior is critical for biological and biomedical studies. The development of techniques for long-term cell and tissue imaging is, however, hindered by phototoxicity induced by excited fluorophores. We, herein, propose a methodology to capture live cell behavior using dark field microscopy (DM). Since the light intensity of DM is merely ∼0.1% of bright-field microscopy (BM) and ∼0.5% of fluorescence microscopy (FM), it allows super long and frequent live cell imaging. Our results demonstrate that continuous exposure to DM light for 48 h brings about no observable effect on the growth rate of 3T3 fibroblasts and HepG2 hepatoma cells, indicating minimum photo-toxicity. Moreover, DM images show contrast comparable to FM, which does not depend on the probes and staining efficiency. We, therefore, conclude that the proposed approach is suitable for long-term live cell imaging with super-high temporal resolution.
Keyphrases
- high resolution
- single molecule
- high speed
- optical coherence tomography
- mass spectrometry
- magnetic resonance
- glycemic control
- magnetic resonance imaging
- fluorescence imaging
- cell death
- cell therapy
- machine learning
- extracellular matrix
- photodynamic therapy
- convolutional neural network
- endoplasmic reticulum stress
- cell cycle arrest
- flow cytometry